No matter how well designed an Internet search engine might be, it also has some potholes that can make your travels bumpy or detours that you may want to avoid.
Congested Home Page: Nothing is more nerve-racking than gridlock (or getting stuck in rush hour traffic). In my opinion, when I first arrive at a search engine home page, I want to get to my destination as quickly as possible. Show me the search field with a search button so I can be on my way. If I want to read additional content, let me choose when I want to. Don’t shove it in my face when I first enter the site. Unfortunately, some search engine home pages don’t get it. They try to provide too much content right away. True, some of the content may be useful at some point, but when trying to navigate quickly from point A to point B, all this additional information can sometimes be too distracting.
Featured or Sponsored Links: As discussed previously, each search engine has their own policies for how they will list search results. Yes, search engines have to make money in order to exist, and one way they do it is by allowing site owners to pay to have their listings displayed at or near the top of the results. In some cases, these links will be displayed in a special section on one side of the list of the results as well. Keep in mind; these sites are usually looking to sell something. So, if you are doing some online shopping, go ahead and visit them. But, if you are not, steer clear.
References to Sites That Don’t Make Sense: Let’s say you are doing some research on your family tree. So, you go to a search engine and type in your last name. In the results, you might find references to online auctions such as eBay.com or Amazon.com (for example) with links to find more information on your last name. Of course, this doesn’t make any sense. What would an online auction have to do with researching your last name? What you are seeing in the results is another form of a paid advertisement that will take one or more of your key words that you used to search on and auto-fill it in a results list. This may not necessarily be limited to online auction sites, but other commercial sites as well. So, when you see search result descriptions that don’t make sense; don’t waste your time.