Jakob Nielsen is a web site usability expert. He knows what causes people pain and pleasure as they navigate around the web. Unlike most of us who became experts by just hanging around for a long time, Mr. Nielsen’s expertise comes from conducting carefully designed usability studies, using real people and real web sites. He publishes an online column called the Alertbox, which draws from these studies.

The latest installment of the Alertbox contained this shocker:

Getting to Google is Hard

How difficult is it to perform a search on Google?

I’m not talking about the challenge of formulating a good query, interpreting the results, or revising your search strategy to reap better results. Those are all very complicated research skills, and few people excel at them.

I’m talking only about the very first step in searching the Web: Getting to your favorite search engine so that you can run a search there.

Would you say this is easy or difficult? Think a bit before reading on.

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If you thought it’s easy to get to Google, think again. In our current round of usability research, only 76% of users who expressed a desire to run a Google search were successful. In other words, 1/4 of users who wanted to use Google couldn’t do so. (Instead, they either completely failed to get to any search engine or ended up running their query on a different search engine — usually whatever type-in field happened to be at hand.)

On the one hand, 76% is a high success rate. On the other hand, getting to Google is a very simple task. It’s not even a true task — that is, it’s not something users want to accomplish for its own sake or something we’d pose as an assignment in user testing. Getting a Google search box is the first step in searching the Web, which is only the first step in doing something real (such as, in one of our test tasks, to find “a strong vacuum cleaner that is easy to use, can pick up pet hair, and costs under $300″).

Also, for this round of research we’re deliberately recruiting above-average users, so the success rate across all Internet users is probably lower than our finding. (Our goal is to discover usability guidelines for the sites people visit after they click through from the SERP, not to document search engine market shares. As a result, we’re not concerned with measuring this precisely.)

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Screenshot 4

Hmmmm…it looks like a bit of review is called for. First, for the purposes of this discussion Google is a noun, not a verb. In other words, we’re talking about Google as a place, not googling as an action. OK? OK.

The original way to perform searches at Goggle has been to navigate to the Google site and enter your search terms there. To do this, enter Google’s URL (http://www.google.com) into the browser’s address box. After you arrive at the Google home page, type your search terms into the search box (see Screenshot 1).

There are often other ways to get your search terms into Google without navigating directly to their site. Most browsers also allow you to enter search terms into Google from within the browser itself. Firefox gives you a search box in the upper right that submits to Google and a number of other search engines. Click the down arrow next to the search box to select from the available search engines (see Screenshot 2).

Many browsers have the Google Toolbar installed. This little program from Google adds several features, including a search box, to a toolbar that appears at the top of your browser (see Screenshot 3).

You can enter search terms into Google using any of the three methods mentioned above. After that, you will see a search engine results page, displayed on the Google site (the SERP referred to in the Alertbox article). From this page you can click on links to various sites and return to the SERP (using the browser’s back button) to refine your search terms. The terms used for the current search can be edited at the top and bottom of the SERP (see Screenshot 4).

Any questions? Please ask them in the comments.

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