Most business information searches on the Internet ranked as unsuccessful

Citation

(2001), "Most business information searches on the Internet ranked as unsuccessful", European Business Review, Vol. 13 No. 3. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2001.05413cab.001

Most business information searches on the Internet ranked as unsuccessful

Most business information searches on the Internet ranked as unsuccessful

Keywords Information retrieval, Internet, Surveys

Results from a survey "How effective are you at finding information on the Internet?", shows that searching the Internet for business information is more likely to be unsuccessful than successful. On average, respondents gave the success ranking of their latest search at 2.8, where a ranking of 1 was completely successful and 5 completely unsuccessful. The success ranking of information professionals was only slightly higher than end-users despite a much higher level of use of paid-for sites and subscription services by information professionals (Table I).

The survey indicates that there is not a lack of paid-for and subscription services for information but free sites and information consultants are lacking in many industries. Over 40 per cent of respondents believe that there is a lack of free portals in their industry compared with 10 per cent who feel there is a lack of paid-for services.

As expected, information professionals are much heavier users of the Internet than end-users although there are similarities in their search strategies. Nearly 48 per cent of information professionals spend more than 15 hours per week searching the Internet compared with 21 per cent of end-users (Table II).

Overall, Yahoo! dominates as the most important search facility for information for business followed by Alta Vista and Google (Table III). However, in the information professional community there is little difference in the use of these sites.

For further information on the survey please contact: Fred Hitchins, IRN Services Limited, 90-93 Greenhill House, London EC1M 6BF. Tel: +44 (0) 20 7251 4040; Fax: +44 (0) 20 7251 8452; e-mail: fred@irn-research.com