Many compensated for the poor site search by using Google to broaden their domain knowledge and attack the keywords on the site search with words or phrases they saw in the first several Google results. This worked fairly well, I’d say.

The older demographics seemed to have more trouble completing some of the simple search tasks. Several failed to locate items they knew were in the database even with their extensive domain knowledge of the subjects the site covered. As a whole, they took much longer to complete the search tasks than the undergraduates.

This is peculiar given the fact that many of these folks are doctoral level academics, people who spend much of their life searching in order to publish their research.

Their lack of ability to adapt to the new Googlesque interfaces highlights their inflexibility. Add to that the fact that they took much longer to find items on the site on average, and I would conclude the undergraduates are definitely _better_ searchers.

We’ll just have to wait and see how the Google generation has adapted to search technology in 2060.

I was watching my 8 year old niece do something like this.
“Uncle Dave, I found this great new game.”

“Oh! where did you find it.”

“Let me show you” (she had no concept of the addressbar at all)
- clicked google favorite
- searched for “games”
-knew exactly where on the page the link she wanted was (BTW, it was Yahoo Games)
-went to Yahoo Games
-found link to another site
-went there directly to the exact game she wanted

She was completely satisfied with doing this flow over and over again and when I suggested bookmarking the page she said why?

Mind you she did have bookmarks, but only in the instances when someone else took her directly to a site (like her cousin, or her uncle) who typed in the URL directly. Otherwise, Google was her navigation tool, no matter how many links it takes.

“some string” site:something.com

I use this a lot, and it works all the time.

There are ways to make a simple search work for people with google-tendancies even in a content limited site. For instance requiring all terms in a search to be present works great for Google who have a zillion documents, but when you have 50,000 you need to be more flexible (if there are 66% of the terms present in a 3 word search, bring it back!). It requires a lot of testing, a lot of programing and a very good (and expensive ) relavance engine, but it’s easier to change the way the search works than change the way people work.

But I wonder how effective even a well done (but more complex) refinement / expansion interface would be. Really seemed to me that it there is strong design style that people have become used to. And they will use it even if it might be more adaptive to use it in another fashion.

For example, another group of users (researchers) seemed more willing to adapt to the interface. They were also the ones who were used to non-Google interfaces for more complex searches.

Lets take Flamenco (the search/browse interface I worked on at Berkeley) as an example: its an effective way to do searches if you are willing to give a more busy interface a try. But I don’t think the undergraduates who we watched would like it – some researchers we showed it to loved it.
(Flamenco is at: http://orange.sims.berkeley.edu/cgi-bin/flamenco/aa/Flamenco)

They can’t both be psychic, and, more importantly, if you want customers, your services better be. You have to know:
1. What they will want, and
2. How they need you to reveal it to them.

It almost seems as if the “Google generation” effect represents a lack of search skill (I’d include query development in this – that is, query formation as one aspect of search efficiency). As a more efficient search engine has taken the work of search away from the user, the search engine becomes more of a black box -user inputs text and *voila* – out comes a search result. The user has no clue what constraints led to their hit or miss on their search.

This could be very good for a search engine (this has to breed reliance on their product), but doesn’t say much for the average user’s understanding of the mechanisms that propel information search.