ADT? Nothing Beyond Page 3

Interesting to see (thanks to the Beeb) there's new Jupiter report based on a a study surveying 2,369 US online consumers. The report points out that most internet searchers give up scrolling through the results after reaching the bottom of page 3.

Other salient info from the report:

• a third of users linked companies in the first page of results with top brands.
• 62% of those surveyed clicked on a result on the first page, up from 48% in 2002.
• 90% of consumers clicked on a link in these pages, up from 81% in 2002.
• 41% of consumers changed engines or their search term if they did not find what they were searching for on the first page.

Brings to mind the recent C|NET interview with Psychiatrist Edward Hallowell. He's identified something similar to ADD he calls Attention Deficit Trait that really describes the modern-day inability to focus thanks to all these electronic "tools" we have beeping at us and demanding our attention all at once.

Combine ADT with the page 3 behavior, and maybe we can optimize our own search engine to only cache the first three pages of results for any query rather than loading all results.