WebProNews

Carpal tunnel syndrome . . . eyestrain . . . and search engine fatigue.  Yes, there’s now one more problem from which deskbound people are likely to suffer.

Some of search engine fatigue’s characteristics are hard to believe, and yet the study on it involved just over 1,000 American adults who have Internet access.  So, courtesy of Greg Sterling, here is Kelton Research’s most shocking stat: “65.4 percent of Americans say they’ve spent two or more hours in a single sitting searching for specific information on search engines.”

If I ever spend over an hour searching for something, I’ll come to one of two conclusions: either the information doesn’t exist or the search engine is garbage.  It seems that many of the study’s participants also chose one of those options, since “[m]ore than three out of four (75.1 percent) of those who experience search engine fatigue report getting up and physically leaving their computer without the information they were seeking - either ‘always,’ ‘usually’ or ‘sometimes.’”

Now, those three possibilities allow for a lot of wiggle room, but it seems that Google, Yahoo, and their competitors have a lot of work left to do if there’s that much dissatisfaction among their users.

Also, there’s a chance that “their competitors” could earn the right to be named individually - that much dissatisfaction would allow for one or more of them to grab a serious chunk of market share.