According to its latest survey - 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers - Outsell Inc. is reporting that professionals are shifting away from their Internet research methods from just four years ago, and now looking more to their peers and colleagues, alerting services and other conveniences .

The report further includes -

Less reliance on open Web ? According to the new survey, 67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fif**** percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.

Research heads in wrong direction ? Both the time spent finding and analyzing/applying information are moving in the wrong direction. Knowledge workers now spend 11 hours per week searching for information, versus 8 in 2001.

In addition, the time they spend analyzing versus gathering information has flipped. Today?s professionals spend most of their time (53 percent) seeking out information. Four years ago, knowledge workers were able to spend 58 percent of their time analyzing and applying what they had found. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.

New opportunities ? The user shift creates opportunities for certain content providers given the luster of the web has worn some of its welcome.

Read the Press Release.

I think it's a case of too much junk being on the search engine pages, I have seen many pages full of junk when searching on somethings and many pages repeated several times, it takes me far longer to find stuff on the search engines than it used to, I just tend to give up.

__________________
Come and visit my blog and site:
My Personal Blog
Lurking Is For Wimps