Nielsen Norman GroupEvidence-Based User Experience Research, Training, and Consulting
Most users are unable to solve even halfway complicated problems with search. Better to redirect their efforts into more supportive user interfaces when possible.
What makes a website good will also give it a high SERP rank, but overly tricky search engine optimization can undermine the user experience.
Search engines extract too much of the Web's value, leaving too little for the websites that actually create the content. Liberation from search dependency is a strategic imperative for both websites and software vendors.
Search engine users click the results listings' top entry much more often than can be explained by relevancy ratings. Once again, people tend to stick to the defaults.
Users now have precise expectations for the behavior of search. Designs that invoke this mental model but work differently are confusing.