From Pew's new study:
Internet users are extremely positive about search engines and the experiences they have when searching the internet. But these same satisfied internet users are generally unsophisticated about why and how they use search engines. They are also strikingly unaware of how search engines operate and how they present their results.Internet users behave conservatively as searchers: They tend to settle quickly on a single search engine and then stick with it, rather than switching as search technology evolves or comparing results from different search systems. Some 44% of searchers regularly use just one engine, and another 48% use just two or three. Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.
I have trouble believing that. Partly it's because I'm such a
Google
whore myself. I joke that I don't actually know anything; I just know
where to look it up online.
But (and admittedly, I haven't read the whole thing so I don't
know
their methodology) I wonder if it's a vocabulary problem. I've
been
talking to people on the phone at work and trying to talk them through
the process of uploading files via their web browser. The problem is,
you ask them what program they're using and they say
"Yahoo!" or
"Comcast!" They don't understand how all the pieces fit
together. I
think they just fire up their computers and then click on an on their
desktop to get online. They then get the default start page their ISP
has set up. That page has a search box on it.
So they're probably using search all the time, but they aren't
thinking, "OK, now I'm using Google..." However, if their
ISP were to
cancel their contracts with Google, Yahoo, etc. and take away their
little box, I bet they'd notice!
The other one was this report from CBS:
A recent study by researchers at the University of Washington found that 1 in 50 people die within one month of having gastric bypass surgery, and that figure jumps nearly fivefold if the surgeon is inexperienced.
Yikes. Those are terrible odds, and yet the surgery's popularity
keeps increasing...
