search engines

The Google Generation Myth

Many people believe that the Google Generation, teenagers now, are an especially adept group, making skillful use of search engines and outperforming their older peers as a result.

It’s not true.

And not only that, if you look at the heaviest users of the web, it’s not kids in their late teens – it’s the elderly.  A fascinating report has been written, commissioned by JISC and the British Library which blows apart many myths about how different generations search for information using search engines.

Read their pdf – it’s terrific stuff…

Categorised as: Search Engines

Google Ranking Effect on Traffic

We spend a lot of time persuading people of the importance of Google and other search engines on the popularity of a page to the world. For this page on a personal blog plenty of hits were coming in, yet suddenly there was an increase in traffic for this page which persisted.

Why? Because for a year, the page came at the top of the second page of Google searches for the term ‘botfly’ and then suddenly it got promoted to second from bottom of the first page. Look at the difference in clicks for that search term from Google:

Google Ranking Effect Graph

The difference is worth about a 30% increase in traffic, in this case.

Categorised as: Search Engines