The Center for Media Research reports that professional workers are spending more and more time searching for information. The survey, HotTopics: 2001 vs. 2005: Research Study Reveals Dramatic Changes Among Information Consumers, commissioned by Outsell, reveals that professionals on average spend 11 hours per week gathering information – up from 8 hours per week in 2001.

Professionals are also looking to alternatives to the Internet with the corporate intranet being one of the winning alternatives.

As reported on V-Fluence, the survey reveals “67 percent of professionals now go to the open Web for information, versus 79 percent in 2001. Fifteen percent rely on their corporate intranets (up from 5 percent), and nine percent consult their colleagues (up from 5 percent). In addition when seeking information fewer now prefer to get it themselves (51% down from 68%) preferring to rely on regularly scheduled updates, members of their team, or their library.

Today's professionals spend 53 percent of their time seeking out information. Collectively, the time spent gathering and looking for information translates to an estimated. 5.4 billion lost hours per year for US corporations.”

The trend underscores a long held and regularly repeated belief that our ability to create information has outstripped our ability to accurately find and effectively use this information.

While search engines can help, they can also be a hindrance. As I wrote two years ago in The Search Isn’t Broken, We’re Broken, “One of the major and universal frustrations heard from Internet and intranet users alike is that corporate search engines "suck". But, are search engines the real problem, or is the issue more complex?

Despite "leaps and bounds" progress in search technology, which is quite advanced, compared to other Web technologies, inaccurate and irrelevant search results continually defeat users performing search queries. Though some search engines may be sub-par, the more likely problem is an absence of people processes and rules for managing information. 

How many times have you been to a website where the title heading is either the URL or is missing altogether? And, how often have you searched a corporate site for product information only to be given endless results that link to press releases that are three or four years old? Poorly organized and often out-of-date information frustrates users and erodes productivity.

“I think searching has become a more difficult process for everyone; this has less to with the quality of search engines and more to do with the meteoric growth in data,” says Josh Mugele, Director of Product Management at Semio, a California-based indexing and categorization technology company. “With more to search through, it's difficult for search engines to maintain high levels of both precision and recall.”