Talk about lack of productivity! 50% of all searches fail
From my friends at Basex, the research firm:
Thanks to the various flaws common to most search tools, 50% of all searches fail. The good news is that those failures are obvious and recognized by the person doing the search. The bad news is that 50% of the searches people believe succeeded actually failed in some way, but this was not readily apparent to the person doing the search. As a result, that person uses information that may be out of date, not the best response for what he was looking for, or is simply incorrect. (We call this the 50/50 Rule of Search.)
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Reader Comments
Hi Marsha,
You link to the Basex site, but not to a specific report. Is your information from “Information Overload: We Have Met the Enemy and He Is Us”? or from a different report. We searched the PDF of that report and couldn’t find a reference to that particular statistic. Could you link us to the particular report? Thanks, Ted Rogers alerted us to your post – so thanks, Ted, too!
Hi Michael,
The stat comes from the Basex Blog post http://www.basexblog.com/2009/07/30/in-the-briefing-room-sas-content-categorization. Hope this helps!
What a wonderful comment in that article – “In an age of Information Overload, where we create more content in a day than the entire population of the planet could consume in a month, more effective tools are needed.”
It’s what I’d like to send to all those Twitter “broadcasters” of facts, quotes and links. We don’t need more information. We need more wisdom, courage, creativity, perspective and grace.
Thanks for linking us to the Basex article. We’d have never found it on our own.
interesting article and facts… searching seems to be hit or miss and living in a world on info overload and over abundance… another element of technology frustration!