Google creates a perceptual trick making us think it is working well, when in fact it performs very poorly. Most of us are wasting around one hour a day because of poor search.

1. Is Google Wasting Your Time?
You could be spending more time on Google than you think

2. Firstly, some benefits
• Google helps us find things quickly
• Google helps us locate things easily
• Google provides us with information instantly
• Google provides apps to help run businesses
• Google is starting to understand us much more
• Where would we be without search engines anyway?

3. We don’t use Google well
• In the UK 90% of searches are three words or less
• Yet Google increases its accuracy the more words we use
• We spend more time searching because our initial search phrases are poor
• People do not spend enough time thinking about the best search words to use

4. Google is not as accurate as we think
• On average we only click on Google results 12.7% of the time*
• Google therefore has a failure rate of 87.3%
• This is worse than it was four years ago when accuracy was 48.55%
• http://www.keyworddiscovery.com/keyword-stats.html?date=2013-08-01

5. Google’s perceptual trick
• Because Google is fast we perceive “activity” that produces “results”
• Low intellectual demand tasks, such as search, that produce instant “results” appear to
us to be working, even if they are not
• Google rewards us every time with something interesting from every search we do
• That reward makes us think what we are doing is good
• As a result we become “blind” to the fact that most of the time it is inaccurate

6. Google wastes your time
• Each time you search, you have to re-search because of the inaccuracies
• Each search takes extra time
• Those regular, frequent episodes of search and re-search add up
• Google is wasting about one hour of your day, every day because of this

7. What is the solution?
• Think before you type – pause for a second or two
• Type search phrases of seven words or more
• Save search results so you do not have to repeat them – use a tool like Evernote
• Get to know Google’s advanced search tools

8. More help?
• For more advice on how you can boost your office productivity by using the Internet in
better ways, contact Graham Jones
• www.grahamjones.co.uk
• +44 118 336 9710
• graham@grahamjones.co.uk