BIOS: Technology Means Business

Founded in 1998, Google has fast become the world's largest and most popular search engine, offering access to more than 8 billion URLs. Reasons for Google's success have been well documented recently, but it's simplicity and resistance to advertising and clutter on the homepage are two key reasons for its dominance, not forgetting that it consistently delivers satisfactory results with clear headings, a summary of the search result and the originating URL.

You can also easily refine your query because Google retains your original search string in search boxes placed at both the top and bottom. Sponsored links are housed off to the right of the page, which allows you to focus on or ignore them depending on your requirements. Such is the quality of Google that I think that we're beginning to see the emergence of a behavioural pattern affecting Google users - or Googlisation!

Googlisation can be described as the conditioning of your expectations and behaviour by the format, popularity and prevalence of the search engine Google. Naturally, this has an impact on design of Web sites and intranets. In usability tests I have noticed that a growing number of users will have quick resort to the search functionality if the path to the required information is not patently clear from the homepage via the main content area or navigation.

So, what does this mean? It would seem that the general user population are starting to look more and more towards the search functionality rather than formal navigation structures in order to find information. Therefore, the search functionality is fast becoming one of the most important aspects of your Web site or intranet.

What can you do? Googlisation is not an excuse for neglecting an intuitive, manageable and consistent navigation scheme. However, I would advise to make searching for information on your site easy to perform. There are many ways you can do this, but of course the information must be searchable in the first place. This requires good meta data for documents, well structured code, effective page titles and proper use of headings and alt tags.