Ho John Lee’s Weblog

I am apparently a well trained, atypical search user.

Users studied in a recently published paper users clicked on the top search result almost half the time. Not new, but in this study they also swapped the result order for some users, and people still mostly clicked on the top search result

I routinely scan the full page of search results, especially when I’m not sure where I’m going to find the information I’m looking for. I often randomly click on the deeper results pages as well, especially when looking for material from less-visible sites. This works for me because I’m able to scan the text on the page quickly, and the additional search pages also return quickly. This seems to work especially well on blog search, where many sites are essentially unranked for relevancy.

This approach doesn’t work well if you’re not used to scanning over pages of text, and also doesn’t work if the search page response time is slow.

On the other hand, I took a quick try at some of the examples in the research paper, and my queries (on Google) generally have the answer in the top 1-2 results already.

From Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, September 2005:

Professor Thorsten Joachim and colleagues at Cornell University conducted a study of search engines. Among other things, their study examined the links users followed on the SERP (search engine results page). They found that 42% of users clicked the top search hit, and 8% of users clicked the second hit. So far, no news. Many previous studies, including my own, have shown that the top few entries in search listings get the preponderance of clicks and that the number one hit gets vastly more clicks than anything else.

What is interesting is the researchers’ second test, wherein they secretly fed the search results through a script before displaying them to users. This script swapped the order of the top two search hits. In other words, what was originally the number two entry in the search engine’s prioritization ended up on top, and the top entry was relegated to second place.

In this swapped condition, users still clicked on the top entry 34% of the time and on the second hit 12% of the time.

For reference, here are the questions that were asked in the original study (182KB, PDF)

Navigational

• Find the homepage of Michael Jordan, the statistician.
• Find the page displaying the route map for Greyhound buses.
• Find the homepage of the 1000 Acres Dude Ranch.
• Find the homepage for graduate housing at Carnegie Mellon University.
• Find the homepage of Emeril - the chef who has a television cooking program.

Informational

• Where is the tallest mountain in New York located?
• With the heavy coverage of the democratic presidential primaries, you are excited to cast your vote for a candidate. When are democratic presidential primaries in New York?
• Which actor starred as the main character in the original Time Machine movie?
• A friend told you that Mr. Cornell used to live close to campus - near University and Steward Ave. Does anybody live in his house now? If so, who?
• What is the name of the researcher who discovered the first modern antibiotic?

This entry was posted on Monday, September 26th, 2005 at 5:53 pm and is filed under Search Engines, Front Page. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.