

Nielsen: users so search-reliant it undermines their problem-solving abilities - adnam
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/search-skills.html

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hammock
Whoever submitted this misinterpreted the results in the headline, but they
are interesting nonetheless.

Basically it boils down to this: the average person overwhelmingly sucks at
Google searching.

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adnam
The headline was taken directly from the article: "today, many users are so
reliant on search that it's undermining their problem-solving abilities".

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jarin
This is more about people not knowing how to use advanced search techniques to
solve problems than it is about people being reliant on search and their
problem-solving skills suffering as a result.

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futuremint
Indeed, the title is misleading. The problem-solving abilities referenced in
the title are those of solving the problem of finding what you want, not
general problem-solving abilities.

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adnam
It was taken directly from the article -- "today, many users are so reliant on
search that it's undermining their problem-solving abilities" -- and made to
fit in 80 characters.

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tomkarlo
We've seen this on our site, which is heavily search focused. Despite having
an "advanced" search menu right next to the default search bar in our header,
essentially no users take advantage of it (and we're dropping it as a result.)

Faceted search is clearly being used by people on sites like Yelp and Amazon
but they might not realize it (and might not think of it as "advanced
search".) Unfortunately it's harder to add faceted search to a general
purpose, free-text search site like Google, so users may not take advantage of
it as readily when doing those kinds of searches.

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gdulli
Does it undermine problem-solving skills or expose a lack of them? Probably a
little of each. If people aren't using advanced search, the search engines
probably aren't helping by burying it and showing a one-textbox start page.
But if someone doesn't understand that not every web page is equally
legitimate or authoritative, it's a failing that's more fundamental.

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andrewcooke
the tone, at least, seems to assume that if people didn't use search engines
they would do _better_. am i reading it wrong? i don't see the argument for
that at all - if you asked someone what was the most populous city in the
world, and they didn't have google handy, i think they would simply guess...

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ChrisArchitect
love how this comes out while <http://agoogleaday.com> is around

