“Web users have always been ruthless and now are even more so,” said Dr Nielsen.
“People want sites to get to the point, they have very little patience,” he said…
Web users were also getting very frustrated with all the extras, such as widgets and applications…[these] extras are only serving to make pages take longer to load…
In 2004, about 40% of people visited a homepage and then drilled down to where they wanted to go and 60% use a deep link that took them directly to a page or destination inside a site.
In 2008, said Dr Nielsen, only 25% of people travel via a homepage. The rest search and get straight there. “Basically search engines rule the web,” he said.
BBC NEWS | Technology | Web users ‘getting more ruthless’
I’m excited about this report because it quantifies an intuition I’ve been grokking: search is actually underrated [by media people] in terms of importance.
The incredible utility of Google is passing into the realm of “things 98% of people take for granted.”
I will ask semi-rhetorically again: what are the implications for advertising (and brands generally) when the most powerful sales tactic is findability?
