Search Listings and Navigational Queries

The goal of commercial web search engines is to deliver searchers to their desired content as quickly and as easily as possible. Likewise, searchers’ main desire is to leave a web search engine to arrive at their desired website (or web page) as quickly as possible. With navigational queries, searchers do not have the patience to explore search results. In their eyes, a query with navigational intent has a clear, right answer.

Searchers who perform navigational queries rarely look past the first three positions, and they are not paying much attention to the snippets in each search listing. Instead, they focus their attention on the link, which is taken from a web page’s title tag, and the URL as shown in Figure 3.10: