Category Archives: Search Behaviors

What Sport Rules on Search?

I’ve been meaning to post on this for awhile, but you know how things go.

Anyway, Google Trends is pretty fun to play with. Being in Canada in hockey playoff season, I thought it would be interesting to compare the big 4 sports in North America.

Here’s the results:

So…over all Football rules in terms of search volume, with very regular peaks in basketball during playoffs.

On the top graph, hockey doesn’t look too impressive, but check out the search volumes in the cities. Hockey rules! Even in Minneapolis, the lone US city to make the list, they’re still looking for hockey. To be honest, we consider Minnesotans honourary (notice the Canadian spelling?) Canadians anyway.

Winnipeg is die hard hockey heartland, and they haven’t had a NHL team in 10 years (the Jets moved to Phoenix and became the Coyotes).

I’m not sure whether to be proud of our national obsession, or a little embarassed.

And in the interest of being topical, here’s how searchers cast their votes in April (the latest month available) for American Idol contestants. Hmm..this was almost a full month before the finals. Could search be the crystal ball for reality TV?

Relevancy Rules in Sponsored Search Ads

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

Let me quote some rather startling numbers to you from a recent eye tracking study we did. In the study, we examined where people first looked on a search results page, where they first scanned a listing, and where they eventually clicked.

First of all, we gave participants a number of different scenarios that involved looking to a search engine to help them make a purchase. We used Google, Yahoo and MSN in the study. In all cases, on all 3 engines, the vast majority of people first glanced at the top- sponsored listings. In eye tracking parlance, we call this a fixation, or a momentary pause of the eye. On Yahoo, 84 percent of the first fixations were on the top sponsored listings when they appeared, on Google it was 81 percent, and on MSN it was 87 percent. So, almost nine out of every 10 people start looking at the search results page by at least glancing at the top sponsored listings

The next thing we measured was active scanning. This is where participants started reading a listing. On Google and Yahoo, there was strong correlation with the first fixation point, with 79 percent of the first reading activity on top sponsored for Yahoo, and 71 percent for Google. MSN was another story. While 87 percent of participants first glanced at the top sponsored ads, only 55 percent started reading there. Almost 32 percent of our participants immediately relocated past the sponsored ads.

Finally, we recorded where the eventual clicks happened. In Google’s case, 26 percent of the clicks happened in the top sponsored ads, with Yahoo it was 30 percent, and MSN came in with 17 percent click through on top sponsored.

Here’s what we took from the numbers. On Google, although over 80 percent of searchers started in the top sponsored, only 26 percent found something relevant and compelling enough to click on, and remember, these were commercial, product oriented searches. On Yahoo, 84 percent started in top sponsored, but in Yahoo’s case, about 30 percent stuck around and clicked an ad. And with MSN, something entirely different was going on. It seems that MSN users have a bad case of banner blindness when it comes to top sponsored ads.

Scanning Follows Relevancy

The reason top sponsored ads are effective is because they’re placed in the highest traffic portion of the page. We orient ourselves in the page on the upper left. Our destination is the top organic ad. Top sponsored ads are placed in the middle of the most popular real estate on the SERP. This is shown by the high percentage of fixations that happen in this section.

But our interactions with the SERP are not all about position. We can, very quickly, determine if what’s there is relevant to what we’re looking for. We quickly scan titles to see if the ads presented match our intent. And when I say quickly, I’m talking fractions of a second. We start picking up relevancy without even having to read the listings by determining scent. If the listing has “scent” and it’s a good match, we’ll not only hang around and start scanning the listing, we may even click on it. Otherwise, we do what we intended to do in the first place and skip down to the organic listings. That’s what’s happening on Google and Yahoo. MSN is another story.

The MSN Two-Step

During the study period, MSN was in experimentation mode. It was in the process of dropping Yahoo ads from the top listing and substituting its own advertising, which in most cases wasn’t keyword-driven to the same extent that the Yahoo ads were. This usually meant that the “scent” or relevancy match wasn’t as great. When this happened, we saw almost immediate relocation down to organic results. Users could determine the existence, or in this case, absence of scent in a fraction of a second and relocated down. In effect, it was an example of banner blindness, where they were determining that the top sponsored results weren’t relevant.

The lesson from this for the search engines is that you can’t take position for granted. You have to deliver with relevancy and the greater the relevancy, or at least, the perceived relevancy, the better those top sponsored ads will perform.

Yahoo’s Relevancy Capitulation

Yahoo has learned this over time. In the beginning days of GoTo/Overture/Yahoo, position was determined solely by bidding. When Google came on the scene, it offered a blended approach, where click-through rates also helped determine position. The theory was, the higher the click-through rate, the greater the relevancy.

Yahoo has recently announced integrating click through rates and relevancy into the sponsored positioning algorithm as well. This is the beginning. Soon, message and landing page relevancy will also be factored into the position equation.

When it comes to capturing a searcher’s click, you have to deliver relevancy. It’s not all about position–and this fact will become more true in the future, not less.

Google and Microsoft Going to War: Is the User the Casualty?

Bill Gates said it, so it has to be true. Microsoft and Google are going to war.

When you read the NY Times article, Saul Hansell and Steve Lohr mention the difference in business models, required server farms, browser default settings and a lot of other tactical considerations. There’s one thing missing: the User Experience.

If Microsoft wants to win the search engine wars, they have to come out with a search engine that people want to use. In the usability tests we’ve conducted with MSN Search, it has failed miserably when going head to head with Google, EVEN WITH MSN USERS! Give a better user experience, and you’ll win. Screw it up, and even locking IE on MSN Search won’t help you.

There’s a fundamental issue that everyone seems to be missing here. The user is in control. We keep seeing stories of how big companies are trying to remove or at least subvert customer control by reducing choices or applying technology.

The Internet creates a fluid market. It can shift alliances almost instantly. It can follow the most desired path in the blink of an eye, and word of new paths can spread virally in an incredibly short time period. Look what happened with illegal downloading of music. The music industry kept trying to plug technological holes and new ones kept appearing. It’s like using duct tape to keep a crumbling dam together. Accept the fact that it’s gone and get your butt to higher ground! Throw around legal threats and awareness ads about piracy all you want. Ultimately the only way the music industry will win is to accept the fact that the days of obscene profits and centralized power are gone and embrace the digital distribution paradigm. Use its efficiencies to give us the music we want at a price that we want to pay. We’re inching towards that, but we’re not there yet.

I know that Microsoft is starting to pay a lot of attention to the search experience, but they should have done more out of the gate. The first versions of MSN search have suffered from fundamental design flaws, lack of relevancy in sponsored search results and some other glaring mistakes. I expected more from the Redmond gang.

Speaking of paying attention to the user experience, I had the pleasure of meeting Michael Ferguson from Ask’s usability team at SES Toronto. For those of you that have heard me speak before you know I’ve taken some pretty big swipes at Ask Jeeves in the past, mainly for the blatent bloating of sponsored ads at the top of the organic results. Like I mentioned to Michael, it’s like somebody was listening at Ask. The new version seems to have taken into account a lot of the things we’ve been saying for awhile, including the practice of Semantic Mapping (Ask’s “Narrow” and “Broaden Your Search” options) and use of the anemic right rail real estate to add some true functionality. Ask is paying attention to the user experience, and I’m guessing it’s going to pay off for them in increased market share. They don’t have it all right yet, but at least they’re listening to the right people: the users.

By the way, this blast isn’t all for MSN. I’ve reserved a little bile for Google. In their rush to create multiple fronts on which to attack Microsoft, they may be overlooking where the battle will ultimately be won. In Danny Sullivan’s own rant, 25 Things I Hate about Google, the underlying theme was, get search right first, then worry about conquering the world. Google is a pretty good search experience, but we’re still talking version 1.0 of search. There’s a lot of work to be done, and so far, I haven’t seen world beater innovation coming out of Google labs.

To me, Google Search is a little like the reliable piece of production equipment that’s been doing a good job for a long time, but it’s long overdue for an overhaul. The problem is, you can’t shut it down because you need to keep production up. I’ve said for some time that Google is a victim of its own success, a common malady for many hot start ups. Before you’re on the radar you can be bold and come out with a new product that blows everybody’s socks off. It becomes wildly successful and generates your main revenue stream. You become a public company. Suddenly, that revenue stream becomes a sacred cow. You can’t follow up on the first act, because the first act guarantees your survival as a company.

Google has a dilemma. It can’t survive in the long term unless it comes out with the next big innovation in search in a very bold way. It has to knock our socks off again. But it can’t survive in the short term, especially with the eyes of every financial analyst in the world on them, if it jeopardizes its current revenue channel by messing around with it. An unenviable position to be in, even if Sergey and Larry have enough money to buy everyone in the world a Segway.

This puts Microsoft and Ask in an interesting position. They aren’t solely dependant on their search revenues. They have relatively deep pockets. And they can afford to be bold.

So be bold, but base innovation on an incredibly deep understanding of what we want in a search experience.

Why Search May Not Fragment

First published April 20, 2006 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

On April 5, fellow Search Insider Max Kalehoff wrote about the likelihood of search continuing to be dominated by three players. Max, very convincingly, argued that our search activity could fragment over a number of properties, some of them vertical engines that offer more functionality, some of them alternative online properties, like social networking sites.

As search becomes an increasing important online staple, I believe the question of where all that activity will take place also takes on increased importance. For that reason, I’d like to play devil’s advocate (in this case, the devil being the established search players, Google, Yahoo and MSN) and offer some reasons why we might continue to consolidate our search activity on these familiar partners.

Creatures of Habit

Generally speaking, our paths are well worn online. We tend to frequent the sites we know, only seeking out new sites when our familiar ones don’t offer what we’re looking for. This is true of most humans.

I’ve written before that online is going through a social evolution, as the early adopters who pioneered the virtual landscape are increasingly being joined by the pragmatic main market. This makes the fact that we tend to frequent sites we know and trust even truer. While viral growth still happens at an amazing pace online, it’s the early adopters, or, in this case, the online mavens, who tend to fuel the viral growth.

And rapid growth is a relative term that we tend to regard disproportionately. If you’re reading this column, my guess is you’re an early adopter. In our social circles, almost everyone we interact with is an early adopter. It’s why we’re in the industry we’re in. So we tend to blow up the importance of the viral growth of new emerging sites. Chances are, everybody you know is aware of Youtube.com, Myspace.com or Technorati.com. But everybody you or I know is an uber-savvy online geek, at least, compared to my mother. Ma’s never heard of Youtube.com. To her, Googling something is still a task to be approached with caution.

For search properties to gain the critical mass needed to safely cross the chasm, they have to attract mainstream users. Otherwise, they’ll become stranded on the leading edge, there to wither and die.

Deep Pockets

Here’s another advantage of the mainstream players. While promising new technologies can gain some significant venture capital cash, it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the billions available to MSN, Google or Yahoo. So, the big three can wait to see which search or online technologies shows the promise of cracking the mainstream market, offering some compelling reasons to use them, and they can swoop in and snap them up.

All things considered, if a Google, Yahoo or MSN can offer equivalent functionality to some hot-as-a-pistol start-up, it’s just easier to stick to one place, rather than hop around the cyber neighborhood. There were image search engines, news search engines and shopping search engines around before the big three started integrating that functionality, but now that they have it, we’re starting to keep our searching under one banner. There is one important thing to note here though; the big three have to at least offer comparable functionality. It doesn’t have to be better, but it has to be just as good. We are not very tolerant of bad user experiences.

Integration

Finally, and I’ve said this over and over again, search is heading for a ubiquitous, transparent future. We will soon see search functionality integrated seamlessly into our applications and operating systems, toiling away on our behalf in the background. In order to make this integration happen, you have to have your foot in either the OS or app world. Microsoft has this in spades, Google is quickly assembling a portfolio of apps and signing up partnerships with potential platform providers, and Yahoo is working the social networking and entertainment integration angle. All of these publishers know what it’s going to take to win the big search war, and they’re already staking their territory. My guess? It would almost be impossible for an emerging player to gain enough ground to challenge their positions.

For the reasons above, I believe that our search activity will continue to consolidate with the big three. The one dark horse I include is Ask.com, which has the potential to gain some significant market share with its new interface. I love underdogs as much as the next guy, but in this case, I think they’re a little late to the dance.

 

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.