FALSE ORACLES:
Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth
About How Search Engines Work
Results of an Ethnographic Study (pdf)
by Consumer WebWatch

We build web sites and search engines, but how much do we know about how people use them? This report helps us understand. From the findings:

Most participants had little understanding of how search engines retrieve Web pages or how
they rank or prioritize links on a results page.
The majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results.

Thanks to BeSpacific for finding this.

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