Information Research blog points to an interesting article from Prentice Hall: Professional Technical Reference which discusses whether or not search engine such as google have made us into wonderful researchers or just ‘lazy googlers’.

The abstract of the article says ‘Every day millions of Internet searchers use Google or other high-speed search engines such as MSN Search. Are all these Googlers just doing the “search lurch”? Try a few key words, click a few search results, and maybe they’ll find what they’re looking for in a few seconds. Or maybe they’ll just give up and move on to something else’.

The rest of the post describes the advent of search engines and its implications for site navigation - do people still navigate within sites, is there a need for this, what implications are there for site designers and so forth, but also discusses the impact this has on users search skills and the time spent looking through each resource. Again, the dangers of electronic resources and easy access to auch a wide variety of information at the click of a mouse has already been widely discussed, with many claiming that such technologies will erode the ability of people to properly search and locate information, as well as reducing the amount of time spent studying a source of information, replaced instead by people moving in and out of websites within a few clicks.

This is relevant stuff - and really interesting! We are always striving at my work to promote the benefits of proper information searches conducted in a logical and efficient manner (to justify our existence!!) - as many people really do feel that it is all available on the first page of Google.

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