As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues

Take our Search Tools Survey

Make your voice heard -- fill in our survey and tell us about your site, Intranet or portal, what you are using for search, or why you haven't jumped on board yet.

Results from our Search Tools Survey

July-August, 2002

We now have 1627 survey results as of July 31, 2002, covering the topics of why site managers have or have not installed search engines, correlations of the sizes of sites and the installation of search engines, frequency of updates, file formats served, languages, and number of languages used on sites.

For web administrator ratings of the search tools they've used, see the Survey Ratings page. This includes evaluations of the most popular search engines (with seven or more responses), other products, and custom development.

Earlier Results

• July 2001: general results / product ratings
• October 2000: general results / product ratings
• September, 1999: general results / product ratings
• March 1999: general results / product ratings

Other Surveys

• Unpuzzling Search: Best Practices from Mondosoft Study IDC Bulletin, August 2002 by Susan Feldman Leading search analyst Susan Feldman describes common problems with search engines and Mondosoft's approach. The company performed extensive research on 57 million search sessions using their own software, with success defined as a click on one of the top ten results, an average of 59%. They found that user are willing to try again (an average of 1.56 queries per session) but that the queries are very short, 52% were only one word, and only 5% of users checked the second page of search results. 22% of the searches produced no results at all, mainly because there was a mismatch between the search topic and the site contents, while 75% of the questions used one of the top 100 search terms. Recommendations include using categories to put results in context, adding synonyms and spelling options; adding content, titles, dates, authors and descriptions; providing manual recommendations; track user behavior with searches and sessions.
  
• Taxonomy & Content Classification: Delphi Group Report (guest or customer access required) Delphi, April 11, 2002
  Defines the increasing need for tools to organize information and avoid overload. Survey results of 450 executives, IT or managers at large enterprise organizations with at least 50,000 documents shows: most spend more than 2 hours per day searching for information, 73% say that finding information is difficult, the main impediments were "bad tools" (28%) and "data changes" (35%). According to the survey, over 95% of the sites have at least 10% of the documents changing monthly. 39% of the respondents have some kind of system for classifying documents while only 33% have any kind of tagging.
  
• Not All Site Features Turn Online Shoppers Into Buyers, PricewaterhouseCoopers' Survey Reports PricewaterhouseCoopers, March 6, 2001
  A survey of 547 Internet users in January of this year found that over three-quarters of the respondents use search features (77%). And search functionality is considered the most important feature for online shopping by 43%, beating product information (40%), when choosing where to shop. Search led customer service, personalization and wish lists in selecting sites. When deciding what to buy, search functions also pay an important role, although enlarged product images, availability and comparison guides are more directly involved. This indicates that e-commerce sites should concentrate on providing excellent search results rather than expensive and complex interactive features.
  
  
• Search Survey Results: "Sex" Popular on the Web, Many People Inefficient at Reaching Their Online Destinations (content removed, see summary) Alexa Research, February 14, 2001
  To no one's surprise, this comprehensive study of 10 web search engines over two years finds that the single most common search is for the word "sex" (0.3289%), as well as "porn", "nudes" and "xxx". More interestingly, web users get confused by the search field, because it is quite common to find them typing in URLs, such as "hotmail", "yahoo" and "ebay". We have found both of these common problems to be true on site search engines as well, and recommend designing No-Matches Pages with this problem in mind.
  
  
• Roper Study on "Web Rage" while Searching (removed from the Roper site: see the ZDNet article on the study). Roper Starch Surveys, December 18, 2000
  Commissioned by the search engine WebTop, this reports the results of a study of people doing general web searches saying:

  On average, it takes 12 minutes of searching the Web for specific information before Internet users get frustrated. Almost one in five Internet users get frustrated if their search takes them up to five minutes to complete. About half of Internet users have the patience to search the Web for longer than 15 minutes.

  Danny Sullivan of SearchEngineWatch has termed this "search rage" based on the statistic that total of 71% of people reported being frustrated at some time during searching, and over half get frustrated by irrelevant information in search results. However, more than 75% usually or always find what they're looking for.

• UKOLN (UK Office for Library and Information Networking) Surveys
  These surveys track search engines used in public web sites in Great Britain, looking for trends. Also covers issues of shared and regional indexing.
  • Surveys of Search Engines on UK Public Library Web Sites October, 2000 by Brian Kelly
  • Surveys of Search Engines on UK University Web Sites August 2000 by Brian Kelly
    
  • Approaches to Indexing in the UK Higher Education Community paper and poster given at the 9th WWW Conference by Brian Kelley
  • WebWatch: UK University Search Engines Ariadne 21 , Summer, 1999 by Brian Kelly
    
    
• Network Computing Magazine Reader Poll Results: Search Engines September, 2000
  Small survey covering search engine satisfaction, features, numbers of pages searched and served, languages, etc.
  
  
• "Most popular search engines within the enterprise" Intranet Journal, November 9, 1998
  Results of an admittedly unscientific survey found intranet webmasters prefer, in order: Ultraseek, Netscape Compass 3, Microsoft Index Server 2, AltaVista Search Intranet, Inmagic/Lycos, Folio Site Director, Magnifi Enterprise 2, ISYS, Phantom and Quadralay WebWorks(tie), with at least one write-in vote for PLS.
  
  
• Htdig survey results
  List of 35 ht://Dig installations, including number of servers, of documents, of words; update frequency; number of hits per day; index size, primary use (intranet, educational, etc.) and problems.
  
  
• April, 1998 - Macintosh Site Search Tools
  
  

Date modified: 2002-12-18