(via The number of people using search engines is in decline - Business Insider) Actually looking for data/studies on the…
(via The number of people using search engines is in decline - Business Insider)
Actually looking for data/studies on the *effectiveness* of search engines. Personally I feel that Google in particular, but others as well, are less and less useful as they return ever more (targeted?) results which tend towards recent events, products etc.
Case in point: I just googled the phrase “as above so below”, and all but one result on the first page was for a 2014 horror movie. The history of this phrase is much wider, and older, than this movie. The one exception was for a very ropey old summary page - which also included a mention of the movie. Duckduckgo’s first page at least included the wikipedia page on Hermeticism, perhaps the most relevant result I would imagine, among various mysticism sites - and more links to the movie.
The same occurs when I google almost anything and mostly get a lot of near-identical news reports (selecting for recency?) that mention something similar to the topic, but usually totally obscuring what I’m actually searching for. Perhaps the result of contemporary SEO-driven web design, rather than an explicit fault of the search engine, but a failure nonetheless.
Short version: I’m finding search engines increasingly useless, and am looking for studies on this.