kris

How do search engine users select their searches and search engines and how do they decide what pages to visit? Obviously when someone performs a search they do not and cannot visit all the results. So how do they make the distinction of which sites to visit? It will depend upon the person.

There are some search engine users who will only visit the top few search results. They will feel these results are the highest ranked and most closely match their search. This, of course, is good for those at the top and bad for others.

Many search engine users will use more than one keyword or phrase when doing a search or research on the Internet. This allows them to have more results to select from. A majority of Internet do use search engines when tryign to locate a product, service or other information on the Web.

Some people have one specifc keyword or phrase in mind and will only perform a search on those words.

darren

i think that in general people will only look on the first page of resulta maybe the second as well but to decide on what page they go to they look at the title of the page and if it sounds like what they are after they go to the page.

Super Mod

I think there has been some research done on this topic that most people (like 90% or so) only view the first page and don't go on to any subsequent pages. Thinking about my own experience, I believe I do this. I will only go on to a second page after I've basically exhausted the entire listing of websites on the front page, which is very rare. Furthermore, I definitely read the snippet of text under the title of the listing before clicking on it. If I don't see something that looks correct in the snippet then I won't even click it.

anne

I look at the title and the excerpts from the page before deciding what to click. I browse through several pages of results until I find what I want.

If I think the site is a forum, I would still click it if I couldn't find what I wanted elsewhere, but I prefer to go to a content site first if there is a content site that looks like it has the right information.

Josie

For my use, it depends what I am searching for. It it's a fairly well known item or event, I hardly ever go past the first page of search results, unless it's a specific company I'm looking for that I can't quite recall the name of.

However, if I'm searching for something that is miniscule in nature, such as information on a certain academic, for example, I'll probably look at all the search results, as they rarely run more than a few pages and I've found some interesting stuff at the end of search results for people/things that have relatively few hits come back.