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Well it's Thursday and this has been a week that has simply zoomed along at a frantic pace. I sometimes wonder if there really is a slower, more peaceful, place on earth to live. I'm sure there was once but these days you can go online just about everywhere so there goes any hope of finding that slower, peaceful place.

To be honest though I doubt that I could handle a slower pace ... I think I've grown accustomed to life the way it's lived now and I probably couldn't cope if we went back to the way things were before the Internet came along.

As I write this there is yet another search engine conference going on ... this time it's over in Europe. There are so many of them these days that you have to wonder if the people who attend most of them ever get any real work done. Perhaps they don't ... perhaps they're professional conference attendees ... who knows?

But whether there are professional conference attendees or not, this one is very interesting. Usually at conferences like this you hear a representative from Google as one of the main speakers and perhaps you get someone from Yahoo or MSN/Live sitting in on a panel but not at this conference.

The organizers of this conference managed to include a speaker from MSN/Live as one of the major speakers and it's interesting to hear what one of the other major search engines has to say about their view of search in general.

Let's look at a couple of interesting points from his address to the conference.

Only one in four clicks from a search engine are successful - 75% then return to the search engine to search again.

Now when you think of it that is an amazing statistic. I'm not sure that it mirrors my search experience but then webmasters are not the average searchers. At the same time you have to wonder whether the search results are at fault here.

Perhaps it's the searcher who can't quite articulate what he's specifically looking for that results in such a low satisfaction rate. Perhaps it's what jumps off the page at the searcher when he clicks through to the site 'recommended' by the search engine that results in such a low satisfaction rate.

Maybe we're so focused on targeting terms for the search engines when we build a web page that we're not targeting the surfer with that term in the way he expects to see it ... or in a way that makes him feel comfortable on the page. I don't know what the answer is but it's something we should all be thinking about. And if you're seeing a satisfaction rate that's higher than one in four for your pages then you know you're doing something right.

Users are relying more on search but expect to be disappointed

Again there is something we should be looking at. How can we overcome that expectation searchers have? If we do provide exactly what they're looking for then we stand a much better chance of making a sale or generating a lead so we need to think about that too.

If you increase the number of words in your query, the results normally get worse

Now that's an interesting one and it's something that mirrors my experience too. The longer the phrase I use to search for the less relevant the results become. However that may not be your experience and I was watching some discussion of about that a little earlier.

It seems that some people in the search and marketing industry do see more relevant results when they use longer phrases but is that what the average searcher sees and is it something that the search engines can improve on? You also have to wonder where the limit is in the number of words in a keyword phrase that we can target and expect to generate some decent hits from the search engines.

30% of the users are using the searchbox as an address bar

This one is something that I've been seeing for some years now and I think that it's going to become even more widespread in the future. In fact I've seen classes for people who want to learn how to use the Internet where the instructor tells them to use the search box instead of the address bar to enter a URL.

My father was taught that concept when he took an Internet course at a seniors group and not matter how much I try to tell him that it's just plain dumb he's sure the instructor is right and I'm wrong. What it all means for us as webmasters though is still a little unclear ... well it's unclear to me ... although it's something you should definitely take into account when you're looking at the referrals that come from the major search engines.

And that's it for me today ... I've now got a morning of meetings to look forward to ... just as well the wind's up and the beach isn't quite as inviting as it could be.