Tag Archives: eyetracking SEO

Was Blended Too Good for Google?

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Search Engine Strategies is back in London next week and it reminded me of the paper that I gave there last year, I thought it would make a good a blog article, so here it is!

In 2008 Paul McCartney and Heather Mills announced their separation precipitating a lot of press coverage. This coincided with Google’s experimentation with blended search results:

As you can see the blended results get organic positions one, two and nine. We ran a sample of 30 people thru our omnibus study, giving them the task to “Find out more about Paul McCartney”. We left the task deliberately vague because we wanted the users to explore something of interest to themselves. The heatmaps of all 30 users shows that the blended results received a lot of attention:

The problem for Google is that the blended results receive almost all the attention, sucking user gazes away from the sponsored links like little black holes. If users don’t look at a link they can’t even consider clicking it, this is a problem if your revenue model is based on PPC!

A few days before I was due to talk at SES 2008 I thought I’d better check to make sure the data was still current, it wasn’t:

As you can see Google had reduced the number of blended results in the first nine organic places from three to one, de-prioritising the importance of blended.

I did the same search today (10th February 2009) and they have changed the algorithm again:

further de-prioritising the blended results down to organic position five. As we have found in previous research organic listings below rank three are much less valuable that ones in the top three.

We will never know how much revenue Google lost by experimenting with blended results, but I expect it’s more that the $4,000 it would have cost to pre-test the concept with Think. Just goes to show even Google gets it wrong on occasion!

Cuil is (currently) destined to fail

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As stated in our previous post, 97% of people we have tested use Google. It is the first and only search engine most all surfers employ. Google’s simple yet efficient display has moulded user’s subconscious search habits and preferences so strongly that new interfaces departing from its model are almost destined to fail even if they do have a compelling offering.

The two/three column approach taken by Cuil challenges the habitualised search behaviour people have developed using Google; it is not intuitive to a world of searchers with an unconscious preference for Google’s linear format.

In addition to this, people are happy with Google, a sample of 90 people recently tested by Think, 86% said they wouldn’t use anything else.

Cuil was created by two former Google employees and it boasts to have the largest search capacity to date, but is that what users are really interested in? People have learned how to search efficiently in order to minimize the time spent searching so how does a 3 column layout with paragraphs of text going to align itself with the learned behaviour?

We tested a sample of 30 people using the new search engine to better understand this.

As shown in the heatmap above, Cuil’s 3 column layout promotes localized areas of attention. Fixations are concentrated upon the headers – this is also where participants clicked to access their desired internet pages. The top results acquired the largest amount of fixations, receding gradually from left to right and top to bottom. Results appearing below the category search box suffered from a low fixation count as they were the last in the viewing order. Although limited attention was paid to the category search box, people did verbalise a sense that this would be helpful.

Breaking from the familiar linear format of Google has lead to an inconsistency in people’s visual behaviour. The gaze plots below illustrate some of the representative paths taken. The many long saccades indicate that users were confused. The page layout is different to the familiar flow of Google and so breaks with the users’ subconscious models of how to search. We believe this is a fundamental problem that will prevent users adopting Cuil.

Users also verbalised their confusion and dissatisfaction:

“When you first see it, it looks too busy. I have to choose what I want to look at.”

“I don’t like the layout – it’s too long-winded; too wordy, and I tend to look at things in a list rather than a box layout.”

“I just looked at the headings instead of the black writing. You wouldn’t need to have so much text if you knew what you were looking for. I think there’s more info than you need on it. It’s just supposed to give you a link. There’s lots of things you don’t see because you don’t bother to scroll down for it.”

Cuil’s layout challenges, rather than takes advantage of, the habitualised search behaviour people have developed through years of using Google.

For this reason we think Cuil is currently destined to fail.

Has Google gotten better?

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How many times do you use Google each day? Each week? Each month? Countless times! And would you say you use it in the same way you did a couple of years ago?

It’s likely that you don’t.

There has been a significant shift in search pattern behaviour; one that reflects rational and effective time management; one that is a result of habitualisation. Here at Think Eyetracking, we conducted a study into search behaviour to explore this.

In a 2005 study we found that people looked through many of the search results before clicking on one. The distribution of attention using Google can be seen in the heatmap below.

In our most recent study, we had 30 participants search for the broad term, Oasis. PEEP methodology was employed; participants were eyetracked while completing the task and later asked about their usual behaviour.

As seen in the heatmap above, fixations are studded around the top 5 results and the majority of clicks are upon the top 3 results (discounting the sponsored link). The sponsored link was actually not well attended to due to the fact that searchers are now familiar with advertiser placement within Google. The 2008 heatmap supports the recent trend observed by Cornell University (Their study found that the top 3 Google results get 79% of all clicks) and by AOL (Findings were that 63% of clicks were concentrated upon the top three search results).

Furthermore when asked afterwards what they would normally do when they couldn’t find their desired search result on the first page of Google, 87% respondents replied that they would modify the search terms or refine the search by category. 97% of people tested answered that Google was the search engine they most commonly used and out of those people, 87% stated they wouldn’t bother using anything else.

It’s not clear that Google has gotten any better, but certainly our use of it has become habitualised. Google’s popularity and dedicated following mean that a large majority of users have grown extremely familiar with the search giant and refine searches to display exactly what they need within the top 5 results. We now expect to find our required answer in the top 5 results.

The use of Google has become habit and users have optimized their behaviour accordingly; they now act in order to eliminate the need to scroll below the fold or sift through additional pages of results. Nowadays to compete competently, you must know your customer’s search words, and land in the top 5, if not top 3 results.