Throw out your bookmarks and ignore page navigation? A thought provoking article called The Search Lurch: Have We Become Lazy Googlers or Smarter Web Researchers? interviews Jakob Nielsen, Jesse James Garrett, Gerry McGovern and Tara Calishain, to get their views on how or if search behavior habits have changed how we use and design web sites.
Will Web users bother going to homepages and trying to figure out each site's navigation scheme? Or with our increasingly shortened attention spans and demands on our time, will we just Google everything?and another question:
Is search engine optimization becoming more important than navigation optimization?
I won't ruin the experience for you, but their responses vary. I resonated with Tara's answers the most.
A truly effective navigation scheme, it seems to me, should prove effective for both a human visitor and a spidering 'bot. The challenge is to build a structure that a 'bot can appreciate and a human can understand, and build a vocabulary of description on your site that a human can appreciate and a 'bot can understand. I believe these are complementary aims.
and for those looking for thrills, the answer is yes. Dr. Nielsen does, in fact utter the words, "deviant design."
