CorpComms Magazine

When you're not using an Internet search engine, your time online becomes valuable, as I alluded to in my Week 2 summary. What used to take me seconds, now takes me minutes. And those minutes all add up. So the last thing I want to do, having found or been directed to a website via a source other than Google, Yahoo! or Bing, is to spend too much time trawling through it looking for the information I need. And this reveals quite a lot about online behaviour that marketers should take note of.

If you think about your own Internet habits, you almost certainly spend no more than a minute on any given website before you surf off somewhere else if you can't find what you're looking for. In fact, it's probably a lot less - I'm not sure what the average statistic is as I can't Google it!

And when you do go elsewhere, I expect you go back to your web search and pick up the next relevant site from the search engine results pages. At present, I can't do this and I know all too well that it will take me more valuable time to find another relevant information source. So I'm starting to really appreciate websites that have clear and easy navigation and, above all, an intra-site search function.

I've talked before about my new-found appreciation of social bookmarking, and one of the reasons for this is the ability to interrogate their databases of posts and pages using keyword tagging. Delicious, Stumbleupon, Digg and the rest are experts at making information easy to find. Most standard websites, much less so.

Any decent web designer will consider on-site navigation as one of the major bedrocks of a site, but I think the rest of us tend to overlook this as it's rather intangible when compared to graphical design and content. But what #NoSearch is doing is magnifying and amplifying aspects of online behaviour that may not be new, but are extremely important and probably don't get enough consideration.

At the current time, I'd take a site with a decent intra-site search function and clear navigation structure that looks awful over a nicely-designed site with no search function at any time. And if my current behaviour is a more conscious and exaggerated version of my normal online habits, then chances are I do this without even thinking about it usually. So maybe it'd be good idea to check out your own site's navigation and add a search function pretty soon.

Read more about the launch of the #NoSearch project

Paul Sutton is head of social communications at BOTTLE. Follow his experiment on the #NoSearch blog, help him out on Twitter or Quora, and check back here every Tuesday for an update.

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