Category Archives: Behavior & Psychology

Google is Now Smarter than Daddy

First published April 6, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

It was a sad day in the Hotchkiss household. While doing her homework, my  12-year-old daughter, Alanna, had a question. Until now, she always asked me, her father. This time, she went straight to Google.  The 10-year-old, Lauren, is already heading in the same direction. I’m sensing the old days may never return.

Being in a somewhat philosophical mood (I have the time, now that I don’t have to answer questions about pH balances and what a litmus test is) I pondered the implications of this. If there’s a box that always has the right answers, what does this mean for our society? How will having instant access to the absolute authority on everything impact us?

Will the Web kill our research attention span?

If you’re of my generation, researching something in school meant heading for the library, discovering that another classmate already had the volume of World Book you were looking for, then digging into the alternatives. Remember the periodical index? You would look up topics in there, to see which magazines had published articles. It always seemed that the best articles were in Scientific American. When I was lucky enough to actually find the issue I was looking for, I would try to decipher an article that was way above my head, looking for my answers. Perseverance was a key factor here, as it was no minor task to follow the threads from article to article, wade through the verbiage and gradually piece together the information I was looking for.

Most times, I never found exactly what I was looking for. I would assemble a construct of related information, and would usually make inferences based on this that would find their way into my various reports. Of course, you would have to cite your sources for that teacher that everyone despised; the one with no life outside the classroom, who would actually take the time to check those sources out and try to trip you up.

But during this arduous process, I learned some lessons that have served me well. I discovered the sheer joy of acquiring knowledge, even if it wasn’t directly related to my quest at the time. I gained the detective skills needed for the research required when the answers weren’t easily at hand. And I probably improved my reading skills by at least one or two grade levels.

Bite-sized wisdom

Today, in the era of keyword search, answers are given out in bite sized-dollops. They quickly rise to the top from their hiding places, burrowed deep within the dense text on an academic Web site, ferreted out by the probing eye of the search engine. Within seconds, my daughter can find exactly what she’s looking for, conveniently highlighted for her.

In doing a number of usability tests, it’s becoming clear that we don’t assimilate information online the same way we do on a written page. We scan for clusters of words, and avoid large blocks of text. The Web page is not the place for studious reading, but rather a quick search-and-destroy mission, getting in, getting what you’re looking for from a heading, a bulleted list or a caption, and getting out again.

I’ve looked over the shoulder of my daughters as they do their homework (they hate it as much as you might guess) and they go straight for the obvious on a Web site. I look at all the other wonderful paths of discovery that lay just one click away, and ask them why they don’t follow them. Their answer? “But this was what I was looking for!” Are we making it all too easy?

Wisdom without the social interaction

For thousands of years, people have passed along wisdom to people. Whether it’s formal education, apprenticeships or parenting, the transference of knowledge has always taken place in a social and personal context. Knowledge was colored and tempered by personal experience and insight. Also, this process helped build our social skills, engendered respect for elders and helped provide a relevant framework with which to apply to newly acquired expertise. We were taught, we were shown, we were inspired and we were nurtured. Today, we’re just informed.

Much as I love Web search, there’s nothing very social about the process. There’s no one to help you apply what you learn. There’s no one to lend the additional insight of their own experience. Answers obtained through a search engine are detached, impersonal, and sometimes, just plain wrong. Are we trading something tremendously valuable for the ease and immediacy of getting our answers online?

Instant answers without the context of “expertise”

As hard as it was to get answers in the pre-Internet days, there was something to be said for the slow steeping in of knowledge. As we poured through encyclopedias and magazines, textbooks and reports, looking for the answers that were hidden just out of sight, we unknowingly gathered a broader expertise on the topics we were researching. This came out of necessity. Finding the answers meant you had to dig through the information surrounding them. You followed paths that were sometimes red herrings, and sometimes wonderful journeys of exploration. The lack of shortcuts made the longer trek necessary, and often, worthwhile. Today, many years later, I still marvel at the basic and simple beauty of Bernoulli’s Principle, what Gregor Mendel did in his pea patch, and the mysteries that lie locked in DNA. I didn’t have the advantage of an animated multimedia presentation, but somehow, 30 years later, the knowledge has stuck. The answers weren’t easy, but they were satisfying.

I hope my daughters have a chance to experience this, too.

Search has a De Facto Standard – For Now

First published February 9, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

We’ve recently done a lot of testing on how people interact with search results, both on the general engines we all use, and vertical search engines in a few industries. We discovered a number of things, but one finding in particular surprised us. The user interaction with search results has been defined. A standard has been established. And until a discontinuous improvement in the search interface comes along, we will expect all search to be the same.

Google: The User’s Definition of Search

Google’s interface has become the de facto standard for search. Even now, all three of the major properties have very similar search results layouts, with only slight variations to distinguish them. It’s in those variations, the nuances of design and layout, where the differences in the user experience can be found. Everything is measured against Google, and at this point, Google’s interface defines the ideal search experience.

Information Scent in Search

First, let me weave together a few theories to give some background to how we retrieve and interpret information on a search results page. First of all, information scent. Almost every interaction we have with a Web site is to find some type of information. We have intent, we have a goal, and when we interact with a site, we want to get closer to that goal. This is especially true on a search engine. Here, our quest for that information is intensified.

Information scent says that most cues on a Web page have an inherent information scent about what could lie behind the cue. Every hyperlink or navigation option offers some “residue” of what we will find when we click on it. We assess all the cues on a page, and typically go to where this scent is the strongest.

On a search engine, we have been conditioned to believe that this scent will be strongest in the top organic listings. We naturally move towards these. The top sponsored ads happen to be in the path between where we typically orient ourselves (upper left corner) and where we want to go to pick up the information scent. Because of their position, they have a good chance of catching our attention. This behavior creates the Golden Triangle we identified in our first eye tracking study.

So, is position enough? No, we do want to verify this by confirming the scent on the individual listings. And here is an important point to remember. On the average, we take about six seconds to scan listings before we choose one on a search results page, and in that time, we scan four or five results (this is based on our previous research). But it takes about six or seven seconds just to read one listing. So we’re not reading them. We’re scanning them, and this is a crucial difference. In scanning them, we’re looking for patterns of words that seem to offer scent. This is the semantic mapping I talked about in a previous Search Insider (I’d Love to Search but Words Get in the Way). We’re spending no more than a second (or less than a second) to pick up whether there’s a pattern of words that offer the information residue we find most closely matches our intent. It’s a split-second decision.

Hit Bolding

So, how do we pick up these patterns? Here’s where Google has created one of its de facto standards. The first place we look is the title of the first listing (toward the left side), and we expect to see our search query bolded. This immediately reinforces that we’re on the right “scent.” From there, we quickly scan to pick up other words. The more hit bolding there is, the stronger the subliminal confirmation that this result offers strong scent.

Google does the best job of query hit bolding. Their use of fonts, the size, and the relative strength of the bolding quickly reinforces a relevant pattern. MSN, in contrast, doesn’t do any hit bolding on the title. Don’t be surprised if you see this change in the near future, as MSN draws closer to the Google standard.

Page Balance

Google also has a slightly different page balance. There tends to be more white space separating organic listings from the sponsored right side rail. The page looks a little less crowded and more usable at a glance. And as I mentioned in last week’s column(The 50-Millisecond Judgment), this split second judgment will affect our entire interaction on the page.

White space aids in the assimilation of word patterns. It causes them to stand out a little more. Have someone run the same query on the top three engines, then show you the three results for a split second each. Which page tends to offer the greatest chance of success? For the majority of us, I’m guessing that’s Google.

Another point on page balance. As I’ve said, our destination is typically the top organic listings. The biggest difference between Yahoo and Google is in how far down the page those organic results are pushed. They are significantly lower on Yahoo. Again, this runs against the standard of what we expect.

Implications for Enterprise Search

Finally, a quick word on enterprise search. For vertical engines and other sites in which search results play a major role, take the emerging standard defined by Google to heart. Understand that when people interact with your search results, they’re expecting a Google-like experience. The further you take them from that, the less ideal the user experience will be.

Google has done a lot right (and a few things wrong) but perhaps the smartest move it’s ever made is to pay meticulous attention to the search user experience. Whether the company designed an ideal interface by intention, or whether we’ve just been conditioned to accept it as the ideal interface, it works for us.

 

The 50 Millisecond Judgement

Originally published February 2, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Fifty milliseconds is not a long time. It’s about one frame of video, or half as long as the blink of a human eye. And that tiny little slice of time is all it takes for a visitor to a Web site to decide how appealing that site is.

Dr. Gitte Lindgaard and her team undertook a fascinating study at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Their goal: to determine just how long it takes to make a reliable judgment of the visual appeal of a Web site. They found that we can accurately judge visual appeal in just 50 milliseconds, or one twentieth of a second! The study was published in Behaviour and Information Technology, March – April 2006.

In three different studies, the Carleton team flashed home pages of Web sites, specifically chosen to provide a spectrum of visual appeal, at participants for varying lengths of time and then asked the participants to rate the pages from 1 (very unappealing) to 100 (very appealing). In the first two studies, the duration of exposure was 500 milliseconds, or half a second. In the third study, participants were randomly shown the pages for either 500 milliseconds, or 50 milliseconds. The ratings were then correlated and analyzed to determine the reliability of the rankings. Dr. Lindgaard’s team found that reliable assessments of visual appeal can be made even with a 50 millisecond exposure.

Beyond this finding, however, there were a number of topics touched on in the paper that site designers should take to heart. While these topics weren’t included in the scope of the study, the paper cites numerous studies that have tried to explore the nebulous area of visual attraction and how we determine it.

Blink Revisited

For anyone who’s read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, you know that researchers are discovering that humans make decisions in two very distinct ways. On a visceral level, it seems that a decision-making mechanism is hardwired right into our physiology. Our bodies seem to reach conclusions long before our brain catches up. To quote Dr. Lindgaard’s paper, “More recent neurophysiological evidence supports the contention that emotional responses can indeed occur pre-attentively, before the organism has had a chance cognitively to analyze or evaluate the incoming stimulus or stimuli. A small bundle of neurons has been identified that lead directly from the thalamus to the amygdala across a single synapse, allowing the amygdala to receive direct inputs from the sensory organs and initiate a response before the stimuli have been interpreted by the neocortex.”

After this very brief response, we begin to rationalize our response by logically evaluating the stimuli. The two-phase decision-making mechanism typically works together to help us reach our conclusions. Gladwell’s contention is that the first response, the “blink” response, is often the right one.

First Impressions Do Count

So, how important is that first, split-second decision in online interactions? Because of something called a “halo effect,” it can be vital. If we have a positive emotional response in those first few milliseconds, our logical mind will kick in and try to rationalize that response. We will look for positive reasons why it was the right decision, and we will tend to ignore negative factors. If the first impression is not good, the opposite occurs. We look for reasons not to like something, and tend to discount any positives we might find. We want to prove our first impression right.

Translated to an online experience, we make an immediate, intuitive decision whether we like a site or not, without reading one word of content. From that moment on, our entire interaction with that site is colored by that first impression.

Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?

How do you judge what is appealing or what is not? It’s a thorny issue, as Dr. Lindgaard acknowledges in the paper. It’s been said that we all have different concepts of what’s beautiful or appealing. However, there was remarkable consistency across all three studies with the sites that were found appealing, and the ones that weren’t. In fact, it was found that in groups of as small as 5 people drawn randomly from the larger group, consensus emerged on the winners and the losers. So while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, it appears that we pretty much see eye to eye when it comes to Web sites.

One reason might be in the factors we use to judge appeal on a Web site. We are not looking at it as a pure object of aesthetic beauty. A Web site should be usable, so we are also making an assessment of how appealing a site would be to use. We’re looking for a site to be clean, pleasant and symmetrical. We’re looking for proper use of screen real estate and balance. Previous research by Dr. Marc Hassenzahl suggests that we may use two methods of evaluation, which he refers to as beauty (the pure aesthetic appeal) and goodness (the more practical factors, including usability).

One thing that wasn’t covered in the study was seeing how sites rank when user intent is added to the mix. The participants in the study had no particular goal in mind. They weren’t looking for anything. I would love to see what happens when we introduce intent and participants are judging sites not just on appeal, but on the promise of delivering on their intent.

A Qualitative Research Primer

For anyone who’s interested in qualitative research, this study offers some valuable tidbits on testing methodologies. It’s an interesting challenge to gather results on something as raw and intuitive as a first impression. The minute you start to analyze the response, you distance yourself from that first visceral reaction. Does the very act of rating a site kick in the rational mechanism and bias the original response? As in most studies, Dr. Lindgaard acknowledges that there are many more questions to be answered here. In a brief chat I had with her, she expressed her eagerness to continue down this path, “This is just the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “There’s so much more here!”

Back To Those 50 Milliseconds

What does this have to do with search marketing? Well, everything. Through the utilization of search engines, you will hopefully be driving thousands of new visitors to your site. That’s thousands of first impressions, formed in less than the blink of an eye. Search marketing is useless if it doesn’t deliver a positive onsite experience. Our obsession with position and click-through is meaningless if all our efforts (and all budgets) are blown apart by those first 50 milliseconds.

It is my intense belief that the key to success lies in better understanding what happens when those synapses fire and those first impressions are formed. It’s not just an understanding of the mechanics of the Web that will create a successful search marketer. It also helps to peer into the awesome machinery of the human mind.

How Gender Affects Search: Part Two

First published January 12, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I talked about studies, done both by the PEW Internet group and Enquiro, that explored the differences between how men and women interact online. A number of differences had been observed in general with how both sexes use the Internet, but I wrapped up by saying that while this was also true in search, the differences seem to be much more subtle.

First, let’s explore one of the biggest variations in how men and women use the Internet. Please understand I’m talking averages and generalities here. Yes, there are women and men who are exceptions to what I’m about to say. I’m aware of the fact, and endlessly grateful for it.

The task-obsessed male.

The PEW study found that while men look at the Internet as a resource and tool to accomplish a task, women use it as a communication channel. Men appreciate the Internet’s ability to help them get the job at hand done. They like the do-it-yourself nature of the Internet, they love new toys, and they’re more apt to adopt and experiment with new technologies. When a man is online, he has a clear goal in sight and is looking for the shortest possible path to get there. While men will experiment forever to get some new piece of software or hardware working, they have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to looking for information online. For everyone who has a Flash intro on their site, here’s my hedged bet. Look at your abandonment numbers when the Flash file is loading, and I’m betting 60 percent-plus of those are men.

The multitasking female.

Women are social creatures. They also multitask better, and are more comfortable browsing. Women will be more patient with non-obvious navigation options. They’re more apt to explore the nooks and crannies of a site to see what they can find. And they look at the Internet as a way to reach out to a larger global community, and to connect with geographically distant friends and family.

Right brain vs. left brain in search.

This offers our first clue why the gender split is not so apparent on search. Search is a task-oriented activity. You got there to get closer to your online objective. For that reason, search is more left-brain (words and numbers) than right-brain (emotions and intuition), a more masculine endeavor than a feminine one. That’s why men were much heavier users of search engines than women in the earlier days of the Internet. Women are catching up, but the balance has been on the male side since day one. And when women do use search, they are forced to adopt a more masculine approach to it.

This right-brain, left-brain theory of mine extends to the actual search interface as well.

I believe one of the reasons we don’t see more gender variation in search result interaction is because the format forces everyone, whether man or woman, to use the left brain to assimilate the information. There are no emotional stimuli, no pictures, not even much in the way of colors. Everything is presented as text. The right brain has been rendered basically useless in this exercise. This has the impact of leveling the playing field between the sexes in interacting with search results.

This is not true throughout the interaction, however. When searchers start clicking through to sites, the typical left-brain and right-brain tendencies take over again, and the nature of interaction again splits along gender lines more noticeably.

We shape what we see in search.

My fellow Search Insider David Berkowitz added his own thoughts after last week’s column. David proposes that it’s the interactive nature of search that eliminates some of the gender variations in how we interact with the results. With most Web sites, the same material is presented to everyone when they arrive, and it’s up to the individual how he or she interacts with it. The content is the same, the design is the same, the navigation options are the same. This allows an open opportunity for men and women to react differently.

But with search, you don’t see results until you take an action, namely the launching of a search. Then, the results are tailored to the query that has just been launched. And it’s this increased level of engagement that may take men and women down a more similar path. We have already dictated the content of the page, to some extent, so there is less opportunity for men and women to react differently to the resulting page. In David’s words, “The search engine becomes the ineffable partner, the one who’s always responding to you on target, based on how you initiated the conversation”.

So those are a few ideas of why Venus and Mars are much more closely aligned in search than in other online destinations. I may be totally off-base, but what else is new? I’m a guy!

How Gender Affects Search: Part One

First published January 4, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

A recent PEW Internet study exploring how men and women use the Internet points out some interesting differences between the sexes. This caught my attention because in every study we’ve done, we’ve tried to break out results by gender and explored the different usage patterns. It’s been fascinating to see how millions of years of conditioning and the differences in our respective genetic wiring have impacted our use of a new technology. The PEW study echoed a lot of what we had seen. What I’d like to do over the next two columns is explore this further. Today, I’ll present some of the more interesting findings from the PEW study and ours, and next week I’ll provide my thoughts on why we may be seeing what we’re seeing.

Comfort Levels:

The PEW study found that men are slightly more intense Internet users than women, and seem to be more engaged when on line. Men are more likely to go online on a daily basis and tend to do so a little more frequently. Men are also a little more likely to have a high-speed connection at home.

When we add age breakdowns to the mix, an interesting anomaly occurs, with older men (65 and over) more likely to be online than older women, but younger women (18 – 29) more likely to be online than younger men.

What They Do Online:

Men and women have very distinct reasons for going online. Men tend to retrieve information, such as weather, news, sports scores, and financial information. They also download software, listen to music (or download it), research products, look for jobs, find out how to repair something, or educate themselves on a topic.

For women, the Internet is first and foremost a communication vehicle, with e-mail a prime reason for usage. Women also look for health, medical and religious information, and support for health or personal problems.

Some gender stereotypes never die. Women are still more likely to look for maps and directions online than men. Once a guy, always a guy!

The Sexes and Search:

It used to be that there was a distinct male bias towards search usage. That is rapidly disappearing, but is still apparent. In earlier studies (done in 2003 and 2004) PEW found that 35 percent of men and 25 percent of women were likely to use a search engine on a typical day. In 2005, usage on both sides of the gender divide soared, but men still edged out women, by 43 percent to 39 percent.

In our research, we found that men were more likely to use Google, which dominated as the engine of choice. For women, although Google was still the number-one choice, it was closely followed by MSN and Yahoo.

We also found that men were more likely to use advanced search queries. They also tended to spend a little less time actively reading listings, and made their decisions to click faster. Women tended to be a little more deliberate in their search sessions. Men scanned more of the search results page, but women spent more time with the page.

We found that women were more influenced by what they read in the listing, when men seemed to be a little more conditioned to trust the first organic listings. This usually translated into slightly higher click-throughs on the sponsored results for women.

Perhaps the most interesting thing we found, despite the differences noted above, was this: when men and women interacted with almost every type of site online, there were distinct differences in how they assimilated information, navigated sites and responded to visual cues. When we looked at how they interacted with a search results page, the differences, while present, were much more subtle.

Why?

Hang onto that question, and I’ll hazard a guess next week.

We Are What We Search? Hopefully Not!

First published December 29, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

To judge from the various most-popular-search lists that are showing up as the year draws to a close, the average search user is a pubescent male, with an IQ that hovers in the low 90’s, and who spends an unhealthy amount of time in his room. I have said, on several occasions, that our search patterns are a reflection of our society. If that’s true, our society’s intellect is about as deep as the ring left by a Starbucks coffee cup.

When I saw the first list come in my e-mail, I don’t know why I was surprised. After all, Pamela Anderson holds the record as the most searched-for term for the past decade, and Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are breathing down her neck. But come on; are we really as shallow as our searches seem to indicate?

Lycos has just released its list for the past year. The top 10 terms for 2005 are:
Paris Hilton
Pamela Anderson
Britney Spears
Poker
Dragonball
Jennifer Lopez
WWE
Pokemon
Playstation
Hurricane Katrina

There we have it, the greatest depository of information every assembled, instantly accessible to all who seek knowledge and enlightenment, and Paris Hilton is the best we can do? And Hurricane Katrina, the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, (although arguably, Paris, Pam and Britney all qualify in this category) barely made the list?

Maybe it’s just Lycos users that are scrapping the bottom of the online barrel. So I checked out Google’s Zeitgeist and Yahoo! Buzz.

Yahoo!’s Buzz is at least a little more balanced on gender. The top 10?
Britney Spears
50 Cent
Cartoon Network
Mariah Carey
Green Day
Jessica Simpson
Paris Hilton
Eminem
Ciara
Lindsay Lohan

Still not a fertile recruitment bed for MENSA, I’m guessing.

Google doesn’t publish the overall top 10, instead breaking them up into categories and top gainers. Perhaps this is their way of defending their users’ intellectual reputation. But if the top news searches are any indication, there are very few Google users following in Edward R. Murrow’s footsteps. Topping the list was Janet Jackson, with such compelling news stories as xbox 360, Brad Pitt, Angelina Jolie, Michael Jackson and yes, the omnipresent Ms. Spears also making the list.

And Newton Minnow called commercial television a vast wasteland!

But wait a minute. Yahoo! Buzz lets you see what other cultures are searching for. How does the U.S. stack up against the world?

You’ll be happy to know the French are just as boorish, with the regular suspects, Britney, Jennifer Lopez and Paris (the scantily clad debutante, not the city) showing up on their list. Toss in Jessica Alba for good measure. The Germans show a disturbing dichotomy in their search habits, with half of the terms showing Teutonic practicality and the other half being just plain kinky. On one hand you have “trip planner,” “weather” and “cheap flights,” and on the other you have “erotica” and “partner swapping.” Interestingly, the Germans don’t seem as star-struck as the rest of the world. The only celebrity to make the list was Sarah Connor, a German pop star.

How about my fellow Canadians? Well, I wish I could report differently, but our national stereotype seems rooted in fact. For seven months out of 12, we’re searching for Hockey.

I Speak Search

First published October 13, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I’m not sure if this is being done in some university somewhere, but I would love to know if our use of search engines is changing how we communicate.

The search query is a form of communication that is deceptive in its simplicity. We are becoming adept at paring down complex concepts into a few well-chosen words, with no unnecessary filler. Even if we do throw in a few “the”s and “what”s, the search engine conveniently strips them from our query.

For example, I wanted to know what time zone Atlanta is in today. I went to Google and typed, “What is the local time in Atlanta?” Google truncated my query to “local time Atlanta.” Of the seven words I typed, four were unnecessary.

Which leads me to think, how many unnecessary words do we use every day as we communicate? If I cut this column down to the bare minimum of words required to convey the concept, it would probably drop from about 800 words to 200 or so. How much of our lives do we spend jamming extraneous words into our conversations and e-mails?

Who’s the advanced searcher?

The common view is that we’re pretty unsophisticated in the way we use search. Less than 5 percent of all searches use advanced search techniques, and by advanced, I mean something as simple as using query operators like “and,” “all” or “not.” I’m betting that the vast majority of Google users have never clicked on that little “Advanced Search” link that sits next to the search box. Sometimes, I think we search marketers are the only ones who ever use these features to mine Google’s index for competitive intelligence regarding back links and pages indexed. But I’m beginning to believe the common view is misguided. I think we’re getting quite sophisticated; we have learned how to make a few words go a long way. Don’t mistake short queries for a lack of sophistication. Generally, a short query matches our intent at the time. We want a broad, inclusive focus. When we’re ready to narrow the parameters, we add the words necessary. We understand that search is an iterative process.

Men (and women) of few words.

One of my favorite examples of on-the-mark ripostes was between two literary adversaries, William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway. Their exchange went like this: Faulkner said of Hemingway: “He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”

And Hemingway’s response: “Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.” Perhaps search engines are turning us into the Hemingways of the online generation. We cut out the fat, distilling concepts into the fewest words possible. We are learning the language of the search query. And although it’s not perfect, and can be frustrating at times, most of the time it works very well, thank you.

Consider the plight of Ask Jeeves. This engine made much of its ability to interpret queries written in plain English. In other words (lots of other words), queries that didn’t have the fat removed. The idea was that we would be more comfortable interacting with an engine with personality, which spoke the same language we do. Ask Jeeves’ current share of the search market? Less than 2 percent (according to Hitwise). While the Ask Jeeves model might have been attractive to new Internet users, we tend to pick up “SearchSpeak” pretty quickly. It’s not difficult. After a couple of queries, we learn how many words it takes to bring back the results we’re looking for, most of the time. Soon, we leave full sentences behind and cut back to just the essential words to frame our search intent.

So, if I’m right, what will our communications look like in a few short years? Will we have discarded the majority of the language, communicating in pared-down, task-oriented phrases? Will using search lead us into a new linguistic shorthand? A manifestation of this trend is now being seen in e-mails and instant messaging. In some cases, we’re even discarding words completely and going with acronyms. You don’t laugh uproariously anymore, you LOL, and if it’s really funny, you ROTFLMAOPMP.

Global SearchSpeak.

Going further, will a truncated version of English become the new international language? Will SearchSpeak pick up where Esperanto left off? Finally, you can have revenge on your grade school grammar teacher and toss away adverbs, adjectives, modifiers and participles to your heart’s content. All we’ll be left with is a handful of tried-and-true nouns and the odd verb. Anybody should be able to become fluent in SearchSpeak in a few months. Then, you can travel the globe, communicating in short, to-the-point phrases: “London pub, near Buckingham Palace” or “Paris hotel NOT rude staff.” While the discarding of the majority of the English language may be a frightening thought, it’s not really that big a leap. This is pretty much the way we all communicated with our parents when we were between the ages of 13 and 18: “Goin’ out…Nowhere…Nothing.Later.”

 

Confessions of an Eye Tracking Junkie

Originally published July 21, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

You know how fires, the ocean, and computer progress bars are mesmerizing? You can sit for hours, watching the constant motion. Next thing you know, you wake up from the reverie and realize that everybody has abandoned you, assuming you’ve passed into a catatonic state.

After looking at hundreds of eye tracking sessions for our most recent whitepaper, I can add eye tracking results to the list. For someone as obsessed with search user behavior as I am, this was a pure jolt of addiction-inducing visual stimuli. Why did they look there? Why didn’t they click? Are they going to scroll down? Wait for it… wait for it… ahh… they did!

It may not be hang gliding or rock climbing, but for me, this is life on the edge. I know, my wife thinks I’m pathetic too.

48 X 2 X 5 = Search Geek Nirvana.

We had 48 people, with 2 eyes each (Greek mythological creatures weren’t included in this particular sample), work their way through 5 separate scenarios using Google. I apologize to the MSN’s, Yahoo!’s, and other engines of the world, but we had to reduce scope somewhere. Your turn’s coming.

Needless to say, we had a lot of sessions to look at. And not once did it get boring. It was fascinating to watch how people navigated a search page.

A lot of detail came out of the study. The whitepaper sits at about 106 pages. But I can share a few of the interesting ones with you.

Google’s Prime Real Estate: The Golden Triangle By now, most people reading this column have probably heard about Google’s Golden Triangle. It represents the region of the most intense scanning and clicking activity. It starts in the upper left corner in the top sponsored ads and extends down to the top four or five organic results. It ends at the bottom of the results visible without scrolling. The Golden Triangle is seen by 80 to 100 percent of the visitors to the page. By contrast, listings below the fold and the side sponsored ads are seen by only 10 to 50 percent of visitors.

Going Sponsored? Stay on Top Top sponsored ads outperformed side sponsored ads in every category. They enjoyed twice the visibility (80 to 100 percent of participants who saw top sponsored versus 10 to 50 percent who saw side sponsored) and click throughs (almost 12 percent versus 5 percent of all clicks) of the side sponsored ads. And people found what they were looking for. In terms of stated satisfaction with the results found after clicking through to a site, the top sponsored ads performed better than any of the listings on the page.

More on Those Eye Catching Top Ads Few of us go to a search engine looking for paid results. But the fact is, they catch a lot of eyes on our way to the organic results. The more that appear on top of those top organic results, the greater the chance that we’ll be spending at least a few seconds looking there. When both sponsored ads and OneBox results (the news, shopping, or local results that appear above the top organic ads in Google) showed up, 70 percent looked at the top sponsored ads first. In some cases, it was just a split second glance (called a fixation point in the study) and then the person quickly moved down to the organic listings before they started to read the listings. This happened in about 12 percent of the cases. But the fact remains, 58 percent of the participants stuck around in these top listings and spent a few seconds scanning them. So, in many cases, this represents your first chance to intercept a prospect.

Anatomy of a Scan Pattern Across all sessions we analyzed in the study, about 30 percent of searchers started scanning in the top sponsored ads, 15 percent in OneBox results, and 50 percent in top organic results. Remember, top sponsored ads and OneBox results don’t appear for every search. It seems that everyone’s intention is to move down to the organic results, but about 14 percent of the time (on first visits to a search results page) searchers click on either a top sponsored link or OneBox results before they get there.

Search Decisions in the Blink of an Eye We don’t spend a lot of time on a search results page. Participants spent an average of about 6.5 seconds on the results page. In that time, they scanned just under four listings before they clicked on one. In most cases, we scan listings rather than read them, and if we do read, it’s usually only the title.

Me, Myself, and Eye For anyone remotely interested in how people move their way through a search page, eye tracking provides some fascinating and compelling insights. You have a record of every eye movement and split-second stop. In many cases, the participant themselves would be surprised to see the places their eyes stopped on the way to the eventual click through. It provides an unequaled visual record of a search page interaction. But be warned, side effects may include the inability to communicate with co-workers and spouses, a glassy haze over your eyes, increased pulse rates when examining aggregate heat maps, and missed wedding anniversaries. So please, proceed with caution.

Hello, my name is Gord, and I love looking at eye-tracking results.

Blink, Thin Slicing and the Art of Search

First published June 9, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Blink, he examines how we make decisions in a split second, and how these intuitive decisions are often more valid than ones we labor over for months.

While Gladwell’s book examines how intuitive decisions are made in a number of situations, it’s fascinating to apply his insights to how we search.

After asking thousands of people to think about they search (through all our research, we’re probably closing in on 3000 now), only one thing has been consistent in our findings. People don’t really know. In some cases, we think we know–but our interactions happen so quickly with the search results page and at such a subconscious level that we’re often at a loss to explain how we chose the results we did. The fact is, the minute we ask people to slow down and start examining their search interaction, that interaction changes and we don’t get a true picture.

When we interact online, we make decisions in split seconds. The rapid-fire assimilation of information and clicking on navigation options is aided by the fact that we can navigate the Web with relatively little risk. If we follow a false lead and end up on a site that doesn’t offer what we’re looking for, the back button is one click away. If only life came with a back button. Wouldn’t it be nice to back out of our mistakes in real life as easily as we can online?

As we navigate, we click merrily along, in a headlong rush to get to our online destination. Only when we perceive that there is increased risk to ourselves–which could present itself as committing some of our personal information, making a purchase, or downloading a file–do we stop and deliberate.

In searching, none of the above risk threats are there. As long as we’re on our favorite search engine, we can’t commit to anything that can’t be corrected with a couple of clicks on the back button.

In our study, we found that people spend an average of 6.4 seconds on a search results page before clicking on a link, and in that time scan an average of 3.9 results. In these few seconds, we assimilate an average of 140 words. Included in those words are between 35 to 60 factors and details we have to consider to make a decision. Yet we take just a few seconds to do this. This is what Mr. Gladwell calls Thin Slicing.

Thin Slicing is the ability to take huge amounts of information and focus in on just what’s important. Then we take these few key pieces of information and make our decision on a subconscious, intuitive level. We don’t know how we made the decision, and if we stop to examine it, we can’t explain the steps we went through. But the decision was made, and in a surprising number of instances, it proves to be the right one. In fact, by trying to take a more logical approach, we often paralyze our decision-making ability.

For the majority of us, the decisions we make while we are on a search results page are an example of thin slicing. Both through cognitive assimilation (actively reading titles and descriptions) and by finding matches to our semantic maps–the group of words that make up the concept we’re search for–through what we see in the listings with our peripheral vision, most of us make decisions on what to click on in seconds.

There are a few deliberate searchers out there who take the time to actively read each title and description before making their decision, but they are few and far between.

What’s the application for search marketing? Understand that placement of keyphrases and words that can catch attention are vital in this split-second environment. This is why position is important. With decisions made in seconds, not a lot of screen real estate is scanned. And every decision is made by weighing the factors in those few listings that were scanned.

So don’t create your search marketing strategies in a vacuum. Explore the competitive environment defined by the search listings for your prime keyphrases. See who else you share the space with, where they’re positioned relative to you, and how you can compete with them for grabbing the attention of your prospective customer. Remember, you can gain them or lose them in the blink of an eye!

I’d Love to Search but Words Get in the Way

First published April 28, 2005 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

The perfect search engine would be a small microchip implanted in our brain. It would act as an instantaneous connection between the vast complexity of our brain and the vast complexity of the Web. To find something, we would just have to think about it and the chip would match that concept with the most relevant destination online.

Unfortunately, such a development hasn’t rolled out of the Google Labs yet. So for now, we have to shoehorn our thoughts into a small quarter-inch by three-inch box on the search engine’s home page. We have to distill our thoughts into a few choice words and hope this provides the search engine with enough to go by. And there lies the ultimate vulnerability point of search. Often, our ideas are too big to capture in one or two words.

Small Words, Big Searches; Big Words, Small Searches We all have different intentions when we go to search. As I’ve mentioned in previous columns, many of us turn to a general search engine when we’re mapping out unfamiliar territory online. When we define the boundaries of our concept, we often leave them vague and inclusive, because we don’t want to rule anything out. So, perhaps I’m at the beginning stages of considering a trip to New Orleans. I haven’t done any research yet, so I’m looking for options and alternatives. My mind is open. This particular canvas hasn’t been painted on yet. So my search is likely to be broad, i.e. “New Orleans.” By keeping it broad, I know I should include everything on New Orleans.

We also use search as a navigation short cut to get to the most appropriate page on the Internet. We want to go directly from point A to B (again, the topic of a previous column) without a lot of detours to get in the way. Often, these types of searches happen well into the research phase. For example, let’s say I had done a lot of research into New Orleans and in a previous session I remember seeing a page on upcoming events on the New Orleans’s Chamber of Commerce Web site. I don’t have the URL and I didn’t book mark it. So I go to the search engine and type in “New Orleans Chamber of Commerce Events.” It’s a very specific search that should take me right where I want to go. I don’t want to see everything on New Orleans. I just want to see this one page.

Mapping Our Thoughts to Words The challenge comes in the search engine trying to interpret my intentions based on my key phrases. Let’s go back to the first example. Although I’ve kept the search broad (“New Orleans”) I obviously have a concept of the type of sites I’m looking for. They could be restaurant directories, accommodation guides, lists of things to do, official visitor sites, or other rich research sources. This is my concept, unstated to the search engine but residing in my mind.

So, when the search results come up, I’m looking at them through a “semantic map” that continues many words that flesh out my concept and might catch my attention. I’m trying to match the ideas in my mind with the results I see on the page. While I searched for “New Orleans” I’m actually looking for anything that might give me valuable and trusted information on how to make my trip to New Orleans more enjoyable.

The Eyes Have It We’ve just recently completed two studies that show the impact of semantic mapping in the search process. One was an eye tracking study and one was an analysis of the importance of different factors in precipitating a click through. Based on these two studies, here’s what seems to happen. The eye looks for a visual cue, generally the phrase we just searched for, in the title. Starting on the top of page on the left hand side, we start scanning down the page in an “F” pattern. While we’re focused on the visual cue, our peripheral vision is open to the appearance of words that might match our semantic map. Even though we didn’t search for any of these words explicitly, their appearance in the title and description has a strong implicit impact on which link we start reading. When there seems to be a match based on a quick scan including both where our eyes are fixated and the extra detail picked up by our peripheral vision, we switch to more traditional reading behavior, reading first the title and then the description from left to right. This lateral activity creates the horizontal arms of the “F”.

As an example, we saw that people searching for digital cameras were presented with two listings from the same site, with almost identical titles. The listings were first and second in the organic results. Both listings promised “unbiased consumer reviews” in the title, after the query string “digital cameras.” We saw fixation points on both of these visual cues. The difference came in what was shown in the description. In the second listing, there were recognized brands mentioned, including Kodak and Nikon. The vast majority of searchers quickly scanned past the first listing and started active reading of the second. It was a better match for their semantic map.

So, what does this mean? Well, it means that it’s not enough to be No. 1. It’s not even enough to make sure you have the query string in your title. To maximize the potential for click through, you have to understand what might be in your target customer’s semantic map and match this through careful crafting of both title and description text. Bidding and organic optimization can put you in the right place, but you’d better have the right message too.