Business Professional Search Habits and Opportunities

Marie Griffin of B-to-B Media Business (and an awesome person), asked me today for my thoughts on the recent Convera Professional Search Study. She passed along the followng data points from the study:

• Although 89% of respondents sometimes (46%) or always (43%) find what they want after several attempts, only 11% said they always find what they want on the first attempt.
• Fifty-nine percent will spend 15 minutes or less on a single search before giving up, but 24% will search for 16 to 30 minutes and 17% are willing to search for more than half an hour.
• On average, 47% of respondents reported they give up after five or fewer fruitless queries and 41% will try six to 10 queries before quitting.
• In response to the question “How often do you try a vertical or topic-specific search engine hoping for better results when you do not find exactly what you want using a popular Internet search engine?” 52 percent of respondents always or sometimes will, but 32% will do so only rarely and 15% never do.
• When they don’t find what they want on a consumer search engine, most respondents, 93%, continue with the same engine, entering a new term with a similar meaning. Sixty-one percent will try a second consumer search engine at some point in the process.

Not sure how much will actually be used in the magazine, but here was my complete response:

The extraordinary amount of time business people spend searching shows that individuals become locked in to the search engine with which they are most familiar and comfortable no matter how long it takes. It’s the “rat and cheese” analogy. Once we learn how to get to the “cheese” we’re comfortable with it, no matter how inefficient. We’d rather have it take longer than find and learn a new search engine to more easily get to the information we’re looking for. We like having one search engine for any kind of search we do whether personal or professional and it’s hard to get us to change unless we absolutely have to.

Is there an opportunity for publishers to here? Yes. First, there is an opportunity to provide searches of information that are not easily found using the general search engines (normalized data, for example). Second, to provide full-text searches of an editiorially filtered sub-set of web sites relevant to a specific industry (e.g. filtering out the junk). The biggest hurdles to success are:

• Making sure you have enough relevant content indexed to be of value
• Making sure the user experience is easy and intuitive
• Promoting that such a resource exists 

I’d be willing to bet that most business readers don’t know about vertical searches available to them in their own industry. If they did, and if they were more convenient to get to and use than the major search engines, business professionals would indeed use them. The problem is that most publishers (including some experiments by Penton for that matter) have not executed as well as they need to on both the product comprehesiveness and ease-of-use, and in putting enough marketing muscle and focus to promote the search to the right customers.