Category Archives: User Behavior

Satisficing, Bounded Rationality and Search

150px-HerbertSimonHerbert Simon came up with some pretty interesting concepts, among them satisficing, bounded rationality and chunking.

Before Simon, we commonly believed that humans came to optimal decisions in a rational manner, based on the information provided. We took all the data that was accessible, weighed pros and cons and used our cortexes to come to the best possible outcome.

Simon, in effect, said that this placed to high a load on us cognitively. In many cases, there was simply too much information available, so we had to make choices based more on heuristics, cutting the available information down to a more manageable level. He called this “satisficing”, a blend of satisfy and suffice. And Simon started saying this a half century ago. Imagine how this translates to the present time.

We have never had more information available. At the click of a mouse, we can access huge amounts of information. There’s simply no way we can process it all and come to rational decisions. And this brings us to another concept, that of bounded rationality. We’re more rational about some decisions than others. It depends on a number of factors, including risk, emotional enjoyment and brand self identification. Think of it as a chart with three axes. One axis is risk. We put more rational thought into decisions that expose us to greater risk. In consumer decisions, risk usually equates with cost, but in B to B decisions, it could also include professional reputation (related to but not always directly tied to cost). We’re going to put a lot more thought into the purchase of a car or house than that of a candy bar. Another axis is emotional enjoyment. This is a risk/reward mechanism to most decisions, and if the reward is one that is particularly appealing to us, we tend to be swayed more by emotion than rational decision. If we’re planning a holiday, we may make some irrational decisions (or at least, they might appear that way to an outsider) based on a sense of rewarding ourselves. We’ll treat ourselves to a few nights in a 5 star resort, when the 3 star resort would offer greater overall value. The final factor, and one that is usually buried somewhere in our subconscious, is how we use brands or products to define who we are. Now, no one usually admits to being defined by a brand, but we all are, to some extent. This touches on the cult-like devotees that some brands develop. Harley Davidson, Rolex, BMW, Apple and Nike all come to mind. Is a Rolex a rational choice? No. But a Rolex defines, to some extent, the person wearing it. It says something about the person.

Bounded rationality says that there are boundaries to the amount of rational thought that we can and we want to put into decisions. The amount we decide is sufficient depends on the three facts discussed.

Now, the use of Search tends to plot somewhere along this 3 dimensional chart. If risk is high and brand identification is low (buying software for the company), there is a high likelihood that search will be used extensively. If risk is low and brand identification is high (i.e. buying a soft drink or a beer) there is almost no likelihood that search will be used. In this case, the two factors usually work inversely to each other. Emotional enjoyment isn’t as directly tied to search activity. We will do as much (or as little) searching for a purchase that will give us great enjoyment as for those that won’t.

It’s interesting to watch how these factors impact search intent and behavior. Satisficing leads to a classic sort of search behavior, what I call I category search, where we use fairly generic, non branded queries that broadly define the category we’re looking at. Let me give you an example. Tomorrow my wife and I are headed to Europe for a week. We’re going to spend a few days in Portugal, then fly up to London for SMX (where I’ll be talking more about these ideas in some of my sessions). We’re flying into Lisbon, then renting a car and driving down to the Algarve region. I have GPS navigation software for my PDA, but only for North America. I wanted to get European software, but because of the limited use of it, I didn’t want to spend too much. The developer of my North American software didn’t make a EU version, so I turned to search to find a suitable candidate. Here there was no brand identification, some degree of risk (if it didn’t work in Europe, I’d be lost, literally) and no emotional enjoyment factor. My first search was what I call a “landmark” search. I wanted to find some sites to plot the landscape. Sites that listed and compared my alternatives would be ideal matches to my intent.

I searched for “pocket pc gps software”, knowing that “gps software” would be too broad. I soon found the sites were pretty much all about North American versions. Few of them offered or reviewed European versions. I spent several minutes on the TomTom site trying to order a European version from Canada but to no avail. Apparently TomTom doesn’t believe people in North America would ever choose to drive in Europe.

In classic “satisficing” behavior, I wanted to cut my research workload by setting some basic eligibility criteria: it had to work on a Pocket PC, it had to be reasonably priced (under $100 preferably) and it had to offer coverage for all of Europe (we’re going back to France and Italy next year and I’d like to use it then as well). My next search was for “pocket pc gps software europe”. This gave me what I needed to begin to create my satisficed list. Ideally, we want 3 or 4 alternatives to compare. I did find the TomTom choice, but I was already frustrated with this, and the price was over my threshold. Destinator also offered an alternative that seemed to be a little better match. It matched all the criteria, appeared to have some decent reviews and was available on eBay for about $75, including shipping. Sold! Was it the optimal choice? Maybe not. If I had spent hours more doing research, I could have probably found a better package or a better value. But it was good enough.

Chunking has to do with cognitive channel capacity, and the amount of information we can store in our heads, accessible for use. Again, we tend to maximize the available slots by creating chunks of information, grouping similar types of information together.

When you look at Simon’s work, even though the majority of it far preceded search engines, it sheds a lot of light on how we use search in a number of cases. If you want to tap into user intent, I would recommend finding out more about bounded rationality and satisficing. Chunking is probably worth a look as well.

Interfaces are only Skin Deep

Steve Haar had a great comment on my post about Ask breaking through in the search market share battle:

I agree about the interface being much better with Ask. But, what about the search results? I took a look at them compared to the others and, between sites for adsense and dead links, the results were so poor I was embarrassed for them. I wonder how many of the searches were from repeat users vs once and gone?

I think Steve points out a fundamental concept that we might tend to forget from time to time. The best interface on a piece of garbage just gives you nice looking garbage. Now, I’m not saying that Ask is garbage. But I’ve seen some cases (and heard anecdotally many more) of some issues with spam and I do think they have some work to do. Ultimately, it’s the quality of the results that will determine marketshare. In fact, a nice interface on top of poor results will kill Ask quicker than ever, as it draws more trial users (as Steve alludes to) and generates more negative word of mouth. This is exactly what Ask doesn’t want to happen.

I’m the first to speak up about the importance of the user experience, but it’s important to remember that the interface is only one small part of that. Ultimately, there needs to be enough under the hood to meet and exceed the user’s expectations. Steve (and others) are indicating that Ask might be falling short in the relevancy horsepower department.

Search and the Digital CPG Shelf

First published October 25, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last April, James Lamberti from comScore, Randy Peterson from Procter and Gamble and I (representing SEMPO) grabbed a relatively quiet corner at the New York Hilton to talk about a potential research project. Here was our wish list:

–    A study that tied together online activity to offline purchase behavior
–    A study that identified the impact of search in a category not typically one that would be identified with search marketing
–    A study that would attempt to quantify the leveraged impact of search with brand advocates

Search and CPG: Are You Kidding?

As you can see, these were pretty lofty targets to shoot for. Choosing the product category was done at that table. What is the last category you would think of as generating significant search activity? Consumer packaged goods. After all, aren’t these either replenishment purchases, where we keep buying the same brand over and over, or a non-considered purchase, where we’re not really concerned with doing much research? Why would we need to turn to a search engine to figure out which toothpaste to buy, or which would be the right chips for Sunday’s ball game? We reasoned that CPG had the “Sinatra” Factor going for it: If search can make it here, it can make it anywhere.

To be honest, we really didn’t know what to expect, but comScore, together with a lot of help from Yahoo and Procter and Gamble, managed to come up with a workable study design. SEMPO jumped on board as a co-sponsor and we put the study out in the field. This week, with numbers crunched and charts drawn, the results were released in a study labeled The Digital Shelf. After several months of holding our collective breaths, we were about to see if people had already locked CPG brands into their brains, eliminating the need to search for product information.

Apparently not.

People went online for CPG information — in fact, to a significantly higher degree than even our most optimistic predictions.  Over a 3-month period, comScore recorded over 150 million visits to CPG websites in four categories: Food Products, Personal Care Products, Baby Products and Household Products. Those are numbers no marketer should ignore. But even more significantly, search drove significant portions of that traffic, from 23% of all visits in Household Products to 60% in Baby Products.

It’s not just automotive or travel that drive search traffic. We search for recipes, how to get the stains out of carpets, the most eco-friendly disposable diaper and yes, even the nutritional information for potato chips. We search, a lot!

And our searching sets us apart as a consumer segment. Searchers tend to be more interested in product information, comparing against competitors and what they need to make a purchase decision. Non-searchers are more interested in special offers and coupons.

Searchers spend more, about 20% more  — in all the categories in the study. In fact, in the Baby Care Category alone, people searching for information and eventually purchasing could result in almost $12 billion in sales.

Search = Opportunity

But perhaps the most compelling finding was this: People search because they’re comparing alternatives. This means they’re not locked into a brand. They could very well be your competitor’s customer right now. Non-searchers are more likely to go directly to a site because they do have a brand preference. They’re just looking for a bargain on that brand. The study found that 36% of searchers had recently switched their brand, compared to 29% of non-searchers. And, interestingly, searchers are less motivated by price. Only 27% of searchers switched because of price, compared to 38% of non-searchers.

So, the study delivered on our original wish list, and then some. It showed that search is a significant influencing factor in the most unlikely product category of all, the stuff on your pantry shelf or under the sink in your bathroom. In fact, I have yet to see a study done on any product category where search didn’t blow the doors off the competition in its effectiveness in connecting with customers. So perhaps the biggest question left unanswered by the study is this: Why are all those branding dollars still going everywhere but search?

The Wisdom of Consumer Crowds?

Following up on the theme of the rewiring of our brains, is the internet making us smarter consumers as well? There certainly seems to be evidence pointing in that direction.

A study by ScanAlert  found that the average online shopper in 2005 took 19 hours between first visiting a store and completing a transaction. In 2007, that jumped almost 79% to 34 hours. We’re taking longer to make up our minds. And we’re also doing our homework. Deloitte’s Consumer Products group recently released research saying 62 percent of consumers read consumer written product reviews on the Internet, and of those, more than 8 in 10 are directly influenced by the reviews.

In James Surowiecki’s Wisdom of Crowds, he believes that large groups, thinking independently with access to a diversity of information, will always make a better collective decision than the smartest individual in the group. Isn’t the Internet wiring this wisdom into more and more purchases? When we access these online reviews, we’re in fact coming to collective decisions about a product, built on hundreds or thousands of individual experiences. As the network expands, we benefit from the diversity of all those opinions and probably get a much more accurate picture of the quality of a product than we ever could from vendor supplied information alone. The marketplace votes for their choice, and the best product should theoretically emerge as the winner.

Of course, nothing works perfectly all of the time. As Surowiecki points out, communication can be an inexact and imperfect process, and information cascades based on faulty inputs can spread faster than ever online. But it’s also true that if a cascade leads to rapid adoption of an inferior product, we’ll discover we’ve been “had” faster and this news can also spread quicker. The connections of online make for a much faster dissemination of information based on experience than ever before, ensuring that the self correcting mechanisms of the marketplace kick into gear faster.

There’s a pass along effect happening here as well. For social networking buffs, you’ve probably heard of Granovetter’s “Weak Ties”. Social networks are made up of dense, highly connected clusters, i.e. families, close friends, co-workers. The social ties within these clusters are strong ties. But spanning the clusters are “weak ties” between more distant acquaintances. The ability for word to spread depends on these weak ties. What the internet does is exponentially increase the number of weak ties, wiring thousands of clusters together into much bigger networks than were ever possible before. This allows word of mouth to travel not only in the physical world but also in the virtual. I looked at a fascinating follow up study to Granovetter’s where Jonathan Frenzen and Kent Nakamoto also looked at the value of the information and the self interest of the individual and their “strong ties” within a cluster as a factor in how quickly word of mouth passes through a network.

Deloitte’s study graphically illustrates the weak tie/strong tie effect. 7 out of 10 of the consumers who read reviews share them with friends, family or colleagues, moving the information that comes through the weak ties of the internet into each cluster, where it spreads rapidly thanks to the efficiency of strong ties. This effect pumps up the power of word of mouth by several orders of magnitude.

But are we also becoming more socially aware in our shopping? The research by Deloitte also seems to indicate this. 4 out of 10 consumers said they were swayed by “better for you” ingredients or components, eco-friendly usage and sourcing, and eco-friendly production or packaging. The internet wires us into communities, so it’s not surprising that we become more sensitive to the collective health of those communities in the process.

What all these leads to is a better informed consumer, who’s not reliant on marketing messaging coming from the manufacturer or the retailer. And that should make us all smarter.

On Your Search Menu Tonight

First published October 4, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

This week Yahoo unveiled a new feature. It doesn’t really change the search game that much in terms of competitive functionality. If anything, it’s another case of Yahoo catching up with the competition. But it may have dramatic implications from a user’s point of view. To illustrate that point further I’d like to share a couple of stories with you.

The feature is called Search Assist. You type your query in, and Yahoo provides a list under the query box with a number of possible ways you could complete the query. This follows in the footsteps of Google’s search suggestions in its toolbar. Currently, Google doesn’t offer this functionality within the standard Google query box, at least in North America. Ask also offers this feature.

Because Yahoo is late to the game, the company had the opportunity to up the functionality a little bit. For example, the suggestions that come from Yahoo can include the word you’re typing anywhere in the suggested query phrase. Google uses straight stemming, so the word you’re typing is always at the beginning of the suggested phrases. Yahoo also seems to be pulling from a larger inventory of suggested phrases. The few test queries I did brought back substantially more suggestions than did Google.

It’s not so much the functionality of this feature that intrigues me; it’s how it could affect the way we search. I personally have found that I come to rely on this feature in the Google toolbar more and more. Rather than structuring a complete query in my mind, I type the first few letters of the root word in and see what Google offers me. It leads me to select query phrases that I probably never would have thought of myself.

Some time ago I wrote that contrary to popular belief, we’ve actually become quite adept at paring our queries down to the essential words. It’s not that we don’t know how to launch an advanced query; it’s that most times, we don’t need to. This becomes even truer with search suggestions. All we have to do is think of one word, and the search engine will serve us a menu of potential queries. It reduces the effort required from the searcher, but let me tell you a story about how this might impact a company’s reputation online.

I Wouldn’t Recommend That Choice

Some time ago I got a voicemail from an equity firm. The woman who left a message was brash, a little abrasive and left a rather cryptic message, insisting that I had to phone her right back. Now, since I’m in the search game, getting calls from venture capitalists and investment bankers is nothing really new. But I’d never quite heard this tone from one of these prospecting calls before. So, I did as I usually do in these cases and decided to do a little more research on the search engines to determine whether I was actually going to return this call or not. I did my quick 30-second reputation check.

Normally, I would just type in the name of the firm and see what came up in the top 10 results. Usually, if there’s strong negative content out there, it’s worth paying attention to and it tends to collect enough search equity to break the top 10. This time, I didn’t even have to get as far as the results page. The minute I started typing the company name into my Google toolbar, the suggestions Google was providing me told the entire story: “company” scam, “company” fraud and “company” lawsuits. Of the top eight suggestions, over half of them were negative in nature. Not great odds for success. Needless to say, I never returned the call.

If these search suggestions are going to significantly alter our search patterns, we should be aware of what’s coming up in those suggestions for our branded terms. Type your company name into Yahoo or Google’s toolbar and see what variations are being served to you. Some of them may not be that appetizing.

Would You Prefer Szechuan?

My belief is that users are increasingly going to use this to structure their queries. It moves search one step closer to be coming a true discovery engine. One of the overwhelming characteristics of search user behavior is that we’re basically lazy. We want to expand a minimal amount of effort but in return, we expect a significant degree of relevance. Search suggestions allow us to enter a minimum of keystrokes and the search engine obliges us with a full menu of options.

This brings me to my other story. Earlier this year we did some eye-tracking research on how Chinese citizens interact with the search engines Baidu and Google China. After we released the preliminary results of the study, I had a chance to talk to a Google engineer who worked on the search engine. In China, Google does provide real-time search suggestions right from the query box. The company found that it’s significantly more work to type a query in Mandarin than it is in most Western languages. Using a keyboard for input in China is, at best, a compromise. So Google found that because of the amount of work required to enter a query, the average query length was quite short in China, giving a substantially reduced degree of relevancy. In fact, many Chinese users would type in the bare minimum required and then would scroll to the bottom of the page, where Google showed other suggested queries. Then, the user would just click on one of these links. Hardly the efficient searching behavior Google was shooting for. After introducing real-time search suggestions for the query box, Google found the average length of query increased dramatically and supposedly, so did the level of user satisfaction.

Search query suggestions are just one additional way we’ll see our search behavior change significantly over the next year or two. Little changes, like a list of suggested queries or the inclusion of more types of content in our results pages, will have some profound effects. And when search is the ubiquitous online activity it is, it doesn’t take a very big rock to create some significant and far-reaching ripples.

Personalization Catches the User’s Eye

First published September 13, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

Last week, I looked at the impact the inclusion of graphics on the search results page might have on user behavior, based on our most recent eye tracking report. This week, we look at the impact that personalization might bring.

One of the biggest hurdles is that personalization, as currently implemented by Google, is a pretty tentative representation of what personalization will become. It only impacts a few listings on a few searches, and the signals driving personalization are limited at this point. Personalization is currently a test bed that Google is working on, but Sep Kamvar and his team have the full weight of Google behind them, so expect some significant advances in a hurry. In fact, my suspicion is that there’s a lot being held in reserve by Google, waiting for user sensitivity around the privacy issue to lessen a bit. We didn’t really expect to see the current flavor of personalization alter user behavior that much, because it’s not really making that much of a difference on the relevancy of the results for most users.

But if we look forward a year or so, it’s safe to assume that personalization would become a more powerful influencer of user behavior. So, for our test, we manually pushed the envelope of personalization a bit. We divided up the study into two separate sessions around one task (an unrestricted opportunity to find out more about the iPhone) and used the click data from the first session to help us personalize the data for the search experience in the second session. We used past sites visited to help us first of all determine what the intent of the user might be (research, looking for news, looking to buy) and secondly to tailor the personalized results to provide the natural next step in their online research. We showed these results in organic positions 3, 4 and 5 on the page, leaving base Google results in the top two organic spots so we could compare.

Stronger Scent

The results were quite interesting. In the nonpersonalized results pages, taken straight from Google (in signed out mode) we saw 18.91% of the time spent looking at the page happened in these three results, 20.57% of the eye fixations happened here, and 15% of the clicks were on Organic listings 3, 4 and 5. The majority of the activity was much further up the page, in the typical top heavy Golden Triangle configuration.

But on our personalized results, participants spent 40.4% of their time on these three results, 40.95% of the fixations were on them, and they captured a full 55.56% of the clicks. Obviously, from the user’s point of view, we did a successful job of connecting intent and content with these listings, providing greater relevance and stronger information scent. We manually accomplished exactly what Google wants to do with the personalization algorithm.

Scanning Heading South

Something else happened that was quite interesting. Last week I shared how the inclusion of a graphic changed our “F” shaped scanning patterns into more of an “E” shape, with the middle arm of the “E” aligned with the graphic. We scan that first, and then scan above and below. When we created our personalized test results pages, we (being unaware of this behavioral variation at the time) coincidentally included a universal graphic result in the number 2 organic position, as this is what we were finding on Google.

When we combined the fact that users started scanning on the graphic, then looked above and below to see where they wanted to scan next with the greater relevance and information scent of the personalized results, we saw a very significant relocation of scanning activity, moving down from the top of the Golden Triangle.

One of the things that distinguished Google in our previous eye tracking comparisons with Yahoo and Microsoft was its success of keeping the majority of scanning activity high on the page, whether those top results were organic or sponsored.

Top of page relevance has been a religion at Google. More aggressive presentation of sponsored ads (Yahoo) or lower quality and relevance thresholds of those ads (Microsoft) meant that on these engines (at least as of early 2006) users scanned deeper and were more likely to move past the top of the page in their quest for the most relevant results. Google always kept scan activity high and to the left.

But ironically, as Google experiments with improving the organic results set, both through the inclusion of universal results and more personalization, their biggest challenge may be in making sure sponsored results aren’t left in the dust. Top of page scanning is ideal user behavior that also happens to offer a big win for advertisers. As results pages are increasingly in flux, it will be important to ensure that scanning doesn’t move too far from the upper left corner, at least as long as we still have a linear, 1 dimensional top to bottom list of results.

An Image Can Change Everything for the Searcher

First published September 6, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

For the many of you who responded to last week’s column about Nona Yolanda, I just want to take a few seconds to let you know that she passed away the evening of Sept. 3, having fought for five days more than doctors gave her. She was in the presence of her family right until the end. We printed off your comments and well wishes and posted them on the hospital door. It was somewhat surprising but very gratifying for my wife’s family to know that Nona’s story touched hearts around the world. Thank you. – G.H.

The world of the search results page is changing quickly, which means that we’re going to have to apply new rules for user behavior. This week, I’d like to look at some results from a recent eye tracking study we did about how we interact with search when graphic elements start to appear on the page. We also tested for the inclusion of personalized results. There’s a lot of ground to cover, so I’ll start off with Universal Search this week, and cover personalization and the future of search next week.

Warning: Graphic Depictions Ahead

You can’t get much more basic than the search results page we’ve all grown to know in the past decade. The 10 blue organic links and, more recently, the top and side sponsored ads have defined the interface. It’s been all text, ordered in a linear top to bottom format. The only sliver of real estate that saw any variation was the vertical results, sandwiched between top sponsored and top organic. So it was little wonder that we saw a consistent scan pattern emerge, which we labeled the Golden Triangle. It was created by an “F”-shaped scan pattern, where we scanned down the left hand side, looking for information scent, and then scanned across when we found it.

But that design paradigm is in the middle of change. The first and most significant of these will be the inclusion of different types of results on the same page, blended into the main results set. Google’s label is Universal Search, Ask’s is 3D Search and Yahoo’s is Omni Search. Whatever you choose to call it, it defines a whole new ball game for the user.

Starting at the Top…

In the classic pattern, users began at the top left corner because there was no real reason not to. We saw the page, our eyes swung up to the top left and then we started our “F”- shaped scans from there. Therefore, our interactions with the page were very top-heavy. The variable in this was the relevance of the top sponsored ads. If the engine maintained relevance by only showing top sponsored when they were highly relevant (i.e. Google) to the query, we scanned them. If the engine bowed to the pressures of monetization and showed the ads even when they might not be highly relevant to the query (we saw more examples of this on Yahoo and Microsoft) users tended to move down quickly and the Golden Triangle stretched much further down the page. It was a mild form of search banner blindness. The one thing that remained consistent was the upper left starting point.

But things change, at least for now, when you start mixing results into the equation. If the number 2 or 3 organic return is a blended one, with a thumbnail graphic, we assume the different presentation must mean the result is unique in some way. The graphic proves to be a power attractor for the eye, especially if it’s a relevant graphic. It’s information scent that can be immediately “grokked” (to use Jakob Nielsen’s parlance) and this often drew the eye quickly down, making this the new entry point for scanning. This reduces the top to bottom bias (or totally eliminates it), making the blended result the first one scanned. Also, we saw a much more deliberate scanning of this listing.

Give Me an F, Give Me an E…

Another common behavior we identified is the creation of a consideration set, by choosing three or four listings to scan before either choosing the most relevant one or selecting another consideration set. In the pre-blended results set, this consideration set was usually the top three or four results. But in blended results, it’s usually the image result being the first result scanned, and then the results immediately above and below it. Rather than an “F”-shaped scan, this changes the pattern to an “E”-shaped scan, with the middle arm of the “E” focused on the graphic result.

The implications are interesting to consider. The engines and marketers have come to accept the top to bottom behavior as one of the few dominant behavioral characteristics, and it has given us a foundation on which to build our positioning strategy. But if the inclusion of a graphic result suddenly moves the scanning starting point, we have to consider our best user interception opportunities on a case-by-case basis.

Next week, I’ll look at further findings.

Search Engine Results: 2010 – Interview with Danny Sullivan

Danny-SullivanHere’s another in the series of the Search:2010 transcripts, this one of my chat with Search Engine Land Editor Danny Sullivan:

Gord: The big question that I’m asking is how much change are we going to see on the search engine results page over the next three years.  What impact are things like universal search and personalization and some of the other things we’re seeing come out, how much of that is going to impact the actual interface the user is going to see.  Maybe let’s just start there.

Danny: I love the whole series to begin with because then I thought, Gosh, I never really sat down and tried to plot out how I would do it, and I wish I had had the time to do that before we talked (laughs).  But it would be nice to have a contest or something for the people who are in the space to say I think this is the way we should do it or where it should go.
But the thing at the top of my head that I expect or I assume that we’re going to get is… I think they’re going to get a lot more intelligent at giving you more from a particular database when they know you’re doing a specific a kind of search.  It’s not necessarily an interface change, but then again it is.  This is the thing I talked about when I was saying about when the London Car Bombing attempts happened, and I’m searching for “London Bombings”.  When you see a spike in certain words you ought to know that there’s a reason behind that spike.  It’s going to be news driven probably, so why are you giving me 10 search results? Why don’t you give me 10 news results?  And saying I’ve also got stuff from across the web, or I’ve got other things that are showing up in that regard.  And that hasn’t changed.  I‘d like to see them get that.   I’d like to see them figure out some intelligent manner to maybe get to that point.  Part of what could come along with that too is that as we start displaying more vertical results the search interface itself could change.  So I think the most dramatic change in how we present search results, really, has come off of local.  And people go “wow, these maps are really cool!” Well of course they’re really cool, they’re presenting information on a map which makes sense when we’re talking about local information.  You want things displayed in that kind of manner.  It doesn’t make sense to take all web search results and put them on a map. You could do it, but it doesn’t communicate additional information for you that’s probably irrelevant and that needs to be presented in a visual manner.  If you think about the other kinds of search that you tend to do, Blog search for instance, it may be that there’s going to be a more chronological display. We saw them do with news archive where they would do a search and they would tell you this happened within these years at this time.  Right now when I do a Google blog search, by default it shows me ‘most relevant’.  But sometimes I want to know what the most recent thing is, and what’s the most recent thing that’s also the most relevant thing right? So perhaps when I do a Search, a Google blog search, I can see something running down the left hand side that says “last hour” and within the last hour you show me the most relevant things in the last hour, the last 4 hours, and then the last day.  And you could present it that way, almost sort of a timeline metaphor. I’m sure there are probably things you could do with shading and other stuff to go along with that.  Image search…Live has done some interesting things now where they’ve made it much less textual, and much more stuff that you’re hovering over, that you can interact with it in that regard.  An I don’t know, it might be that with book search and those other kinds of things that there’ll be other kinds of metaphors that come into place that you can do when you know you are going to present most of the information just from those sorts of resources.  With Video search… I think we’ve already seen a lot of the thing with video search is just giving you the display and being able to play the videos directly.  Rather than having to leave the site because it just doesn’t make sense to have to leave the site in that regard.

Gord: When I was talking to Marissa, she saw a lot more mash ups with search functionality, and you talked about having maps and that with local search making sense, but its almost like you take the search functionality and you layer that over different types of interfaces that make sense, given the type of information your interacting with.

Danny: Right.

Gord: One thing I talked about with a few different people is ‘how much functionality do you put in the hands of the user?’ how much needs to be transparent? How hard are we willing to work with a page of search results?

Danny: By default, not a lot, you know if you’re just doing a general search, I don’t think that putting a whole lot of functionality is going to help you. You could put a lot of options there but historically we haven’t seen people use those things, and I think that’s because they just want to do their searches. They want you to just naturally get the right kind of information that’s there and a lot of the time if they give you that direct answer you don’t need to do a lot of manipulation.  It’s a different thing I think when you get into some very vertical, very task orientated kinds of searches, where you’re saying, ‘I don’t just need the quick answer, I don’t just need to browse and see all the things that are out there, but actually, I’m trying to drill down on this subject in a particular way’.  And local tends to be a great example. ‘Now you’ve given me all the results that match the zip code, but really I would like to narrow it down into a neighborhood, so how can I do that?’  Or a shopping search.  ‘I have a lot of results but now I want to buy something, so now I need to know who has it in inventory? Now I really need to know who has it cheapest? And I need to know who’s the most trusted merchant?’ Then I think the searcher is going to be willing to do more work on the search and make use of more of the options that you give to them.

Gord: Like you say, if you’re putting users directly into an experience where they are closer to the information that they were looking for, there’s probably a greater likelihood that they’re willing to meet you half way, by doing a little extra work to refine that if you give them tools that are appropriate to the types of results they are seeing.  So if it’s shopping search, filtering that by price, or by brand.  That’s common functionality with a shopping search engine and maybe we’ll see that get in to some of the other verticals. But I guess the big question is, in the next three years are the major engines going to gain enough confidence that they’ll be providing a deeper vertical experience as the default, rather than as an invisible tab or a visible tab.

Danny: I still tend to think that the way that they are going to give a deeper vertical experience is the visible tab idea, which is you know, that you are not going to be overtly asked to do it, it is just going to do it for you, and then give you options to get out of it, if it was the wrong choice. So, both Ask, and Google, which are getting all the attention right now, for universal search, you know, blended search if you wanna find a generic term for it that, doesn’t favor one service over the other.  The other term is federated search and I’ve always hated that because it always felt like something from that, you know, came out of the Star Trek Enterprise (laugh). No, I want Klingon search! (laugh) I think that in both of those cases you do the search and the default still is web.  And Ask will say, over here on the side we have some other results. Yes, universal search is inserting an item here or an item there but in most of the cases it still looks like web search, right? They still, really feel like OneBoxes. I haven’t had a universal search happen to me yet that I’ve come along and I’ve thought ‘that really was something I couldn’t have got just from searching the web’ except when I’ve gotten a map.  That’s come in when they’ve shown the map, and that is that kind of dramatic change, and I think at some point they will get to that point, that kind of dramatic change where you just search for “plumbers” and a zip code.  I’m so confident of it I’m just going to give you Google local. I’m not just going to insert a map and give you 7 more web listings that are down there. I’m going to give you a whole bunch of listings and I’m going to change the whole interface on you and if you’re going ‘well, this isn’t what I want’, then I’m going to be able to give you some options if you want to escape out of it.  I like what Ask does, in the sense that it’s easy to escape out of that thing because you just look off to the side and there’s web search over here, there’s other stuff over there.  I think it’s harder for Google to do that when they try to blend it all together. The difficulty remains as to whether people will actually notice that stuff off to the side, and make use of it.

Gord: That was actually something that Jacob Nielsen brought up. He said the whole paradigm of the linear scan down the page is such a dominant user behavior, that we’ve got so used to, you know engines like Ask can experiment with a different layout where they’re going two dimensional, but will the users be able to scan that efficiently?

Danny: I’ve been using this Boeing versus Airbus analogy when I’m trying to explain to people the differences between what Google is doing and what Ask is doing.  Boeing is going, ‘Well, we’ll build small fast energy-efficient jets’ and Airbus is saying ‘We’ll build big huge jets, and we’ll move more people so you’ll be able to do less flights’.  And when I look at the blended search, Google’s approach is, well, we’ve got to stay linear, we’ve got to keep it all in there. That’s where people are expecting the stuff and so we’re going to go that way.  Ask’s approach is we’re going to be putting it all over the place on the page and we’ve got this split, really nice interface.  And I agree with them. And of course Walt Mossberg wrote that review where he said ‘oh they’re so much nicer, they look so much cleaner’, and that’s great, except that he’s a sophisticated person, I’m a sophisticated person, you’re a sophisticated person, we search all the time.  We look at that sort of stuff. A typical person might just ignore it; it might continue to be eye candy that they don’t even notice. And that is the big huge gamble that is going on between these two sorts of players and then, yet again, it might not be a gamble because when you talk to Jim Lanzone, he says ‘My testing tells me this is what our people do’. Well, his people might be different from the Google people. Google has got a lot more new people that come over there that are like, ‘I just want to do a search, show me some things, where’s the text links? I’m done’. So I tend to look perhaps more kindly on what Google is doing, than some people who try to measure them up against Ask because I understand that they deal with a lot more people than Ask, and they have to be much more conservative than what Ask is doing.  And I think that what’s going to happen is those two are going to approach closer together.  The advantage, of course, Jim has over at Ask, is that he doesn’t have to put ads in that column so he’s got a whole column he can make use of, and it is useful, and it is a nice sort of place to tuck it in there. If you really want to talk about search interfaces, what will be really fun to envision is what happens when Ajax starts coming along and doing other things. Can I start putting the sponsored search results where they are hovering above other results? Is there other issues that come with that?  There may be some confusion as to why I’m getting this and why I’m getting that. Can I pop up a map as I hover over a result? I could deliver you a standard set of search results and I can also deliver you local results on top of a particular type of picture.  If I move my mouse along it, I could show you a preview of what you get in local and you might go “Oh wow, there’s a whole map there”. I want to jump off in that direction.  That would be really fun to see that type of stuff come along there, but I’m just not seeing anything come out of it.  What we typically have had when people have played with the interface is, these really WYSIWYG things like, ‘well we’ll fly you though the results, or we’ll group them’.  None of which is really something that you’d need, that added to the choices, “do I want to go vertical, do I not want to go vertical?”

Gord: When we start talking about the fact that the search results page could be a lot more dynamic and interactive, of course the big question is what does that do for monetization of the page?  One of the things that Jakob (Nielsen) talked about was banner blindness.  Do people start cutting out sections of the page?  We talked a little about that.  How do you make sure that the advertising doesn’t get lost on the page when there’s just a lot more visual information in there to assimilate?

Danny: Well I think a variety of things that are going to start happening there.  For example, Google doesn’t do paid inclusion, right, but Google has partnerships with YouTube and they have these channels, and they’re going to be sharing revenue from these channels with other people. So when they start including that stuff up, perhaps they are getting paid off of that.  They didn’t pay to put it in the index but, because they are better able to promote their video channels, more people are going over there, and they’re making money off of that as a destination.  So in some ways, they can afford to have their video results start becoming more relevant because they don’t have to worry about if you didn’t click on the ad from the initial search result, they sort of lost you.  In terms of how the other ads might go, I guess the concern might be if the natural results are getting better and better why would anyone click on the ads anyway?  Maybe people will reassess the paid results and some people will come through and say that paid search results are a form of search data base as well.  So we’re going to call them classifieds or we’re going to call them ads, we’re going to move them right into the linear display.  You know there’ll be issues, because at least in the US, you have the FCC guidelines that say that you should really keep them segregated.  So if you don’t highlight them or blend them in some way, you might run into some regulatory problems.  But then again, maybe those rules might start to change as the search innovation starts to change, and go with it from there.  I don’t know, the search engines might come up with other things.  You know we’re getting toolbars that are appearing more on all of our things. Google might start thinking, ‘Well, let’s put ads back onto that toolbar’.  We used to have those sorts of things, and everyone seems to catch on, but they might come back, and that might be another way that some of the players, especially somebody like Google, might make money beyond just putting the ad on the search result page.

Gord: In the next three years, are we going to get to the point where search starts to become less of a destination activity like the way it is now, and the functionality  sits underneath more of Web 2.0 or semantic web or whatever you want to call it.  It almost becomes a mash up of functionality that underlies other types of sites. Are we going to stop going to a Google or a Yahoo as much to launch a distinct search as we do now?

Danny: You know people have been saying that for at least 3 or 4 years now, especially with Microsoft. ‘Oh you’re not even going to go there, you’re going to do it from your desktop.’  Vista, which I have yet to actually use.  I’ve got the laptop and I’m about to start playing with it! Apparently, it’s supposed to be even more integrated than it was with XP.  But I still tend to think, you know what? We do stuff in our browsers.  I know widgets are growing and I know there’s more stuff that’s just drawing stuff into your computer as well, but we still tend to do stuff in our browser.  I still see search as something where I’m going to go to a search engine and do the search.  With the exception of toolbars. I think we’re going to do a lot more searching through toolbars.  Tool bars are everywhere; it’s really rare for me to start a search where I’m actually not doing it from the toolbar.  I just have a toolbar that sits up there, and I don’t need to be at the search engine itself.  But I still want the results displayed in my browser.  Because I think most of the stuff I’m going to have to deal with is going to be in my browser as well.  So it doesn’t really help to be able to search from Microsoft Word, right?  Because I don’t want all these sites in a little window within Word. I’m probably going to have to read what they say, so I’m probably going to have to go there.  I think that will change though if I have a media player, then I think it makes much more sense for me, and you can already do this with some media players, where you can do searches, and have the results flow back in.  iTunes is a classic example. iTunes is basically a music search engine.  Sure, it’s limited to the music and the podcasts that are within iTunes, but it doesn’t really make any sense for me to go to the Apple website. Although, interestingly, here’s an example where Apple is just a terrible failure.  They’ve got all this stuff out there, they’ve got stuff that perhaps you might be interested in even if you don’t use their software and there’s just no way to get to it on the web.  The last time I looked you really had to do the searches in iTunes.  So they’re missing out on being a destination for those people who say ‘I’m not going to use iTunes’  or ‘I don’t have iTunes’ or ‘I’m on a different version.’ I don’t know if you’ve downloaded it recently but it takes forever and it’s just a pain.

Gord: I think that covers off the main questions I wanted to cover off in this.  Is there anything else as far as search in the next three years that you wanted to comment on?

Danny: You know, it’s hard because if you’d asked me that three years ago, would I have told you, ‘watch for the growth of verticals and watch for the growth of blended search’, (laughs) right?  I’ve been thinking really hard because, I’m like, ‘Gosh, now what am I going to talk about because they’re doing both of those things’. I think personalized search is going to continue to get strong.  I do think that Google is onto something with their personalized search results.  I don’t think that they’re going to cause you to be in an Amazon situation where you’re continuing to be recommended stuff you’re no longer interested in.  I think that people are misunderstanding how sophisticated it can be.  I think that the next big trend is that, ironically from what I just said to you, search is going to start jumping into devices.  And everything is going to have a search box.  But it will be appropriate.  My iPod itself will have a search capability within it.  And the iPhone, to some degree, maybe is going to be that look at how it’s happening already. But I’ll be able to search, access, and get information appropriate to that device within it.  Windows Media Center, when I first got that in 2005, I said, this is amazing, because it’s basically got TV search built into it.  I do the search and then of course, it allows me to subscribe to the program, and records the program, and knows when the next ones are coming up.  And it makes so much more sense for that search to be in that device than it did for me to have it elsewhere.  I use it all the time, when I want to know when a programs on, I don’t have to find where the TV listings are on the web, I just walk over to my computer and do a search from within the Media Center player.  So I think we’re going to have many more devices that are internet enabled, and there’s going to be reasons why you want to do searches with them, to find stuff for them in particular.  That’s going to be the new future of search and search growth will come into it.  And in terms of what that means to the search marketer, I think it’s going to be crucial to understand that these are going to be new growth areas, because those searches when they start are going to be fairly rudimentary. It’s going to be back in the days of, OK, they’re probably going to be driven off of meta data, so you got to make sure you have your title, and your description and making sure the item that your searching for is relevant.

Gord: So obviously all that leads itself to the question of mobile search, and will mobile search be more useful by 2010?

Danny: Sure, but it’s going to be more useful because it’s not going to be mobile search.  It’s just the device is going to catch up and be more desktop-like.  I have a Windows mobile phone at the moment, and I have downloaded some of the applets like Live Search and Google Maps, and those can be handy for me to use, but for the most part, if I want to do a search, I fire up the web browser, I look for what I’m looking for, the screen is fairly large, and I can see what I wanted to find.  And I think that you’re going to find that the devices are going to continue to be small and yet gain larger screens, and have the ability for you to better do direct input. So if you want to do search, you can do a search. It’s not like you’re going to need to have to have something that’s designed for the mobile device that only shows mobile pages.  I think that’s going to change.  You’re going to have some mobile devices that are specifically not going to be able to do that and those people in the end are going to find that no one is going to be trying to support you.

Gord: Thanks Danny.

Eye Tracking on Personalized Search: a Tough Nut to Crack

First published August 16, 2007 in Mediapost’s Search Insider

I was in Seattle for the SMX show when somebody asked me if we were planning on doing eye tracking studies on personalized search results.  I replied that I would love to do it, but I just wasn’t sure how.  To accurately track interactions with a personalized page of results, you have to be able to have access to your participant for a significant period of time and track their click stream data. That raises some rather ugly privacy concerns.  The other problem is that Google’s current implementation of personalization is so watered down, it really doesn’t have much impact on the user experience.  What would be really interesting to do is to see what a user interaction might look like with personalized results the way they’ll be in two to three years.

Planting a Research Seed…

With that seed planted, I came back from Seattle, and the first thing I did  was to sit down with our research team and start to explore how we might pull this off.  We realized early on that we wouldn’t be able to do the kind of study where we bring in participants from our regular panel and track interactions with a real search engine.  To come up with a really interesting study, we were going to have to fudge it on the methodology a bit. This was not going to be a study with bulletproof methodology.

So we opted for interesting instead.  We decided that it would be fascinating to speculate on what the search results page might look like in 2010, with a more personalized, richer experience that brings many types of results onto the same page.  How would the eye navigate a search results page that included more than just text-based Web results?  How would we interact with images and video, maps and audio files, all interwoven on the same results page?  How would advertising standout from the organic results? Would the Golden Triangle still exist? Would we still scan the results in an F-shaped pattern?

All these were top-of-mind questions So, starting in late June, we started to put the study together.  Because we couldn’t use our traditional panel (because of privacy issues involved in getting a truly personalized experience) we had to reach out to our circle of family and friends.  What we wanted to do was track interactions with the search results page as it might progress over the next three years.

We came up with three different flavors of search results: the universal results we’re saying today on Google, a slightly more aggressive presentation of universal and personalized search that we might see in a year or two, and then a much more personalized, varied presentation of results in a portal-like format that might represent the search results page in three years time.  We were able to interview some of our favorite experts in the world of search usability and behavior to get a glimpse of what search might look like in the year 2010.  They included Jakob Nielsen, Marissa Mayer, Larry Cornett, Justin Osmer, Greg Sterling, Danny Sullivan and Chris Sherman.

Heat Mapalooza

 I’ve just spent the last week going over hundreds of heat maps slices to try to get a white paper together to release for SES San Jose.  By the way, for regular readers of this column, you’ll remember that when I came back from Seattle, I was somewhat taken aback by the lack of interest in what personalization might mean for the search marketer.  For the 20 or so of you that posted comments indicating that you are definitely interested in how personalization will impact search marketing and would like to hear my thoughts, you’ll be happy to know that we’re adding a section to this white paper on just that subject.

The End of the Golden Triangle?

Without spoiling the results of the study, here are a few tidbits I can share.  Even in Google’s present linear format, the minute you start introducing images into the results, you break down the scan patterns that result in the Golden Triangle.

We saw significant variations in initial orientation points on the page, which led to a much different interaction and scanning pattern.  We tend to fixate on images and if these images appear in the top of page real estate, they create different entry points for the eye.  Our entry point has traditionally been in the far upper left, but now we may orient on an image that’s in the second or third result and then move to further scanning from this point.

In the sessions where we saw the scanning activity move down the page and start from an in-line graphic, we saw a different level of interaction with the sponsored results. Scanning is pulled down the page and away from the top of page, Golden Triangle real estate.

One of the really interesting things to consider is that the interface of the search results page is in more flux now than it has been in any time in the past decade.  Engines are increasingly looking at presentation of results as a key differentiating factor in the search engine war.  Ask really pushed this approach with their introduction of 3-D Search.

The search results page we see now has largely defined itself, based on Google’s success, across all the major search properties and has remained relatively static over the past few years.  All that is about to change.  As we search for a richer and more relevant search experience, the elements of the page will be in constant flux.

One of the challenges will be in making sure that as personalization takes hold, the relevance of the organic results and the relevance of the sponsored results stay in sync.  This was a point contantly hammered home by Marissa Mayer in several interviews with her.  While Google is choosing the organic side to roll out its personalization technology, the company has to ensure that the relevancy of the sponsored results doesn’t begin to drop, relative to personalized organic results.  There will be a delicate juggling act needed to ensure that the user experience and the effectiveness of advertising don’t sway too far from the ideal point of balance.

I can tell you that the heat maps I’ve seen so far are the most interesting ones I’ve seen since we first identified the Golden Triangle. If you do happen to be at SES San Jose, try to catch the results at the research update panel. Otherwise, I’ll give you a heads-up when it’s available in this column in a few weeks time.

Interview with Jakob Nielsen on the Future of the SERP (and other stuff)

jakob-nielsen_cropped.jpg.400x400_q95_crop_upscaleI recently had the opportunity to talk to Jakob Nielsen for a series I’m doing for Search Engine Land about what the search results page will look like in 2010.  Jakob is called a “controversial guru of Web design” in Wikipedia (Jakob gets his own shots in at Wikipedia in this interview) because of his strongly held views on the use of graphics and flash in web design. I have a tremendous amount of respect for Jakob, even though we don’t agree on everything, because of his no frills, common sense approach to the user experience. And so I thought it was quite appropriate I sound him out on his feelings about the evolution of the search interface, now that with Universal search and Ask’s 3D Search we seem to be seeing more innovation in this area in the last 6 months than we’ve seen for the last 10 years. Jakob is not as optimistic about the pace of change as I am, but the conversation was fascinating. We touched on Universal Search, personalization, banner blindness on the SERP and scanning of the web in China, amongst other things. Usability geeks..enjoy!

Gord: For today I only really have one question, although I’m sure there be lots of branch offs from it. It revolves around what the search engine results page may look like in 2010.  I thought you would be a great person to lend your insight on that.

Jakob: Ok, sure.

Gord: So why don’t we just start? Obviously there are some things that are happening now with personalization and universal search results. Let’s just open this up. What do you think we’ll be seeing on a search results page in 3 years?

Jakob: I don’t think there will be that big a change because 3 years is not that long a time. I think if you look back three years at 2004, there was not really that much difference from what there is today.  I think if you look back ten years there still isn’t that much difference.  I actually just took a look at some old screen shots in preparation before this call at some various search engines like Infoseek and Excite and those guys that were around at that time, and Google’s Beta release, and the truth is that they were pretty similar to what we have today as well.  The main difference, the main innovation seems to have been to abandon banner ads, which we all know now really do not work, and replace them with the text ads, and of course that affected the appearance of the page.  And of course now the text ads are driven by the key words, but in terms of the appearance of the page, they have been very static, very similar for 10 years.  I think that’s quite likely to continue. You could speculate the possible changes. Then I think there are three different big things that could happen.

One of them that will not make any difference to the appearance and that is a different prioritization scheme. Of course, the big thing that has happened in the last 10 years was a change from an information retrieval oriented relevance ranking to being more of a popularity relevance ranking. And I think we can see a change maybe being a more of a usefulness relevance ranking. I think there is a tendency now for a lot of not very useful results to be dredged up that happen to be very popular, like Wikipedia and various blogs. They’re not going to be very useful or substantial to people who are trying to solve problems. So I think that with counting links and all of that, there may be a change and we may go into a more behavioral judgment as to which sites actually solve people’s problems, and they will tend to be more highly ranked.

But of course from the user perspective, that’s not going to look any different. It’s just going to be that the top one is going to be the one that the various search engines, by what ever means they think of, will judge to be the best and that’s what people will tend to click first, and then the second one and so on. That behavior will stay the same, and the appearance will be the same, but the sorting might be different. That I think is actually very likely to happen

Gord: So, as you say, those will be the relevancy changes at the back end. You’re not seeing the paradigm of the primarily text based interface with 10 organic results and  8-9 sponsored results where they are, you don’t see that changing much in the next 3 years?

Jakob: No.  I think you can speculate on possible changes to this as well. There could be small changes, there could be big changes.  I don’t think big changes. The small changes are, potentially, a change from the one dimensional linear layout to more of a two dimensional layout with different types of information, presented in different parts of the page so you could have more of a newspaper metaphor in terms of the layout. I’m not sure if that’s going to happen.  It’s a huge dominant user behavior to scan a linear list and so this attempt to put other things on the side, to tamper with the true layout, the true design of the page, to move from it being just a list, it’s going to be difficult, but I think it’s a possibility.  There’s a lot of things, types of information that the search engines are crunching on, and one approach is to unify them all into one list based on it’s best guess as to relevance or importance or whatever, and that is what I think is most likely to happen.  But it could also be that they decide to split it up, and say, well, out here to the right we’ll put shopping results, and out here to the left we’ll put news results, and down here at the bottom we’ll put pictures, and so forth, and I think that’s a possibility.

Gord: Like Ask is experimenting with right now with their 3D search. They’re actually breaking it up into 3 columns, and using the right rail and the left rail to show non-web based results.

Jakob: Exactly, except I really want to say that it’s 2 dimensional, it’s not 3 dimensional.

Gord: But that’s what they’re calling it.

Jakob: Yes I know, but that’s a stupid word. I don’t want to give them any credit for that. It’s 2 dimensional. It’s evolutionary in the sense that search results have been 1 dimensional, which is linear, just scroll down the page, and so potentially 2 dimensional (they can call it three but it is two) that is the big step, doing something differently and that may take off and more search engines may do that if it turns out to work well.  But I think it’s more likely that they will work on ways on integrating all these different sources into a linear list. But those are two alternative possibilities, and it depends on how well they are able to produce a single sorted list of all these different data sources.  Can they really guess people’s intent that well?

All this stuff..all this talk about personalization, that is incredibly hard to do. Partly because it’s not just personalization, based on a user model, which is hard enough already. You have to guess that this person prefers this style of content and so on.  But furthermore, you have to guess as to what this person’s “in this minute” interest is and that is almost impossible to do. I’m not too optimistic on the ability to do that.  In many ways I think the web provides self personalization, you know, self service personalization. I show you my navigational scheme of things you can do on my site and you pick the one you want today, and the job of the web designer is to, first of all, design choices that adequately meet common user needs, and secondly, simply explain these choices so people can make the right ones for them.  And that’s what most sites do very poorly. Both of those two steps are done very poorly on most corporate websites. But when it’s done well, that leads to people being able to click – click and they have what they want, because they know what they want, and its very difficult for the computer to guess what they want in this minute.

Gord:  When we bring it back to the search paradigm, giving people that kind of control to be able to determine the type of content that’s most relevant to them requires them interacting with the page in some way.

Jakob: Yes, exactly, and that’s actually my third possible change. My first one was changing to the ranking scheme; the second one was the potentially changing to two dimensional layouts. The third one is to add more tools to the search interface to provide query reformulation and query refinement options. I’m also very skeptical about this, because this has been tried a lot of times and it has always failed.  If you go back and look at old screen shots (you probably have more than I have) of all of the different search engines that have been out there over the last 15 years or so, there have been a lot of attempts to do things like this. I think Microsoft had one where you could prioritize one thing more, prioritize another thing more. There was another slider paradigm. I know that Infoseek, many, many years ago, had alternative query terms you could do just one click and you could search on them, which was very simple. Yet most people didn’t even do that.

People are basically lazy, and this makes sense.  The basic information foraging theory, which is, I think, the one theory that basically explains why the web is the way it is, says that people want to expend minimal effort to gain their benefits.  And this is an evolutionary point that has come about because the people, or the creatures, who don’t exert themselves, are the ones most likely to survive when there are bad times or a crisis of some kind. So people are inherently lazy and don’t want to exert themselves. Picking from a set of choices is one of the least effortful interaction styles which is why this point and click interaction in general seems to work very well. Where as tweaking sliders, operating pull down menus and all that stuff, that is just more work.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: But of course, this depends on whether we can make these tools useful enough, because it’s not that people will never exert themselves.  People do, after all, still get out of bed in the morning, so people will do something if the effort is deemed worthwhile.  But it just has to be the case that if you tweak the slider you get remarkably better results for your current needs.  And it has to be really easy to understand. I think this has been a problem for many of these ideas. They made sense to the search engine experts, but for the average user they had no idea about what would happen if they tweaked these various search settings and so people tended to not do them.

Gord: Right. When you look at where Google appears to be going, it seems like they’ve made the decision, “we’ll keep the functionality transparent in the background, we’ll use our algorithms and our science to try to improve the relevancy”, where as someone like Ask might be more likely to offer more functionality and more controls on the page. So if Google is going the other way, they seem to be saying that personalization is what they’re betting on to make that search experience better.  You’re not too optimistic that that will happen without some sort of interaction on the part of the user?

Jakob: Not, at least, in a small number of years. I think if you look very far ahead, you know 10, 20, 30 years or whatever, then I think there can be a lot of things happening in terms of natural language understanding and making the computer more clever than it is now. If we get to that level then it may be possible to have the computer better guess at what each person needs without the person having to say anything, but I think right now, it is very difficult.  The main attempt at personalization so far on the web is Amazon.com. They know so much about the user because they know what you’ve bought which is a stronger signal of interest than if you had just searched for something.  You search for a lot of things that you may never actually want, but actually paying money; that’s a very, very strong signal of interest.  Take myself, for example. I’m a very loyal shopper of Amazon. I’ve bought several hundred things from them and despite that they rarely recommend (successfully)…sometimes they actually recommend things I like but things I already have. I just didn’t buy it from them so they don’t know I have it. But it’s very, very rare that they recommend something where I say, “Oh yes, I really want that”. So I actually buy it from them.  And that’s despite the (fact that the) economic incentive is extreme, recommending things that people will buy. And they know what people have bought. Despite that and despite their work on this now for already 10 years (it’s always been one of their main dreams is to personalize shopping) they still don’t have it very well done. What they have done very well is this “just in time” relevance or “cross sell” as it’s normally called. So when you are on one book on one page, or one product in general, they will say, here are 5 other ones that are very similar to the one you’re looking at now. But that’s not saying, in general, I’m predicting that these 5 books will be of interest to you. They’re saying, “Given that you’re looking at this book, here are 5 other books that are similar, and therefore, the lead that you’re interested in these 5 books comes from your looking at that first book, not from them predicting or having a more elaborate theory about what I like.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: What “I like” tends not to be very useful.

Gord: Interesting. Jakob, I want to be considerate of your time but I do have one more question I’d love to run by you.  As the search results move towards more types of images, we’re already seeing more images showing up on the actual search results page for a lot of searches. Soon we could be seeing video and different types of information presented on the page. First of all, how will that impact our scanning patterns?  We’ve both done eye scanning research on search engine results, so we know there is very distinct patterns that we see.  Second of all, Marissa Mayer in a statement not that long ago seemed to backpedal a bit about the fact that Google would never put display ads back on a search results page, seeming to open a door for non text ads.  Would you mind commenting on those two things?

Jakob: Well they’re actually quite related.  If they put up display ads, then they will start training people to exhibit more banner blindness, which will also cause them to not look at other types of multimedia on the page. So as long as the page is very clean and the only ads are the text ads that are keyword driven, then I think that putting pictures and probably even videos on there actually work well.  The problem of course is they are inherently a more two dimensional media form, and video is 3 dimensional, because it’s two dimensional – graphic, and the third dimension is time, so they become more difficult to process in this linear type of scanned document “down the page” type of pattern.  But on the other hand people can process images faster, with just one fixation and you can “grok” a lot of what’s in an image, so I think that if they can keep the pages clean, then it will be incorporated in peoples scanning pattern a little bit more. “Oh this can give me a quick idea of what this is all about and what type of information I can expect”.  This of course assumes as well one more thing which is that they can actually select good pictures.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: I would be kind of conservative until higher tweaking with these algorithms, you know, what threshold should you cross before you put an image up.  I would really say tweak it such so that you only put it up when you’re really sure that it’s a highly relevant good image.  If there starts becoming that there are too many images, then we start seeing the obstacle course behavior. People scan around the images, as they do on a lot of corporate websites, where the images tend to be stock photos of glamour models that are irrelevant to what the user’s there for.  And then people involve behavior where they look around the images which is very contrary to first principals of perceptual psychology type of predicting which would be that the images would be attractive. Images turn out to be repelling if people start feeling like they are irrelevant. It’s a similar effect to banner blindness. If there’s any type of design element that people start perceiving as being irrelevant to their needs, then they will start to avoid that design element.

Gord: So, they could be running the risk of banner blindness, by incorporating those images if they’re not absolutely relevant…

Jakob: Exactly.

Gord: …to the query. Ok thank you so much.  Just out of interest have you done a lot of usability work with Chinese?

Jakob: Some. I actually read the article you had on your site. We haven’t done eye tracking studies, but we did some studies when we were in Hong Kong recently, and to that level the findings were very much the same. In terms of pdf was bad and how people go though shopping carts. So a lot of the transactional behavior, the interaction behavior, is very, very similar.

Gord: It was interesting to see how they were interacting with the search results page.  We’re still trying to figure out what some of those interactions meant

Jakob: I think it’s interesting. It can possibly be that the alphabet or character set is less scannable, but it is very hard to say because when you’re a foreigner, these characters look very blocky, and it looks very much like a lot of very similar scribbles.  But on the other hand, it could very well be the same, that people who don’t speak English would view a set of English words like a lot of little speck marks on the page, and yet words in English or in European languages are highly scannable because they have these shapes.

Gord: Right.

Jakob: So I think this is where more research is really called for to really find out.  But I think it’s possible, you know the hypothesis is that it’s just less scannable because the actual graphical or visual appearance of the words just don’t make the words pop as much.

Gord: There seems to be some conditioning effects as well and intent plays a huge part.  There’s a lot of moving pieces with that and we’re just trying to sort out. The relevancy of the results is a huge issue because the relevancy in China is really not that good so…

Jakob: It seems like it would have a lot to do with experience and amount of information.  If you compare back with uses of search in the 80’s, for example, before the web started, that was also a much more thorough reading of search results because people didn’t do search very well. Most people never did it actually, and when you did do it you would search through a very small set of information, and you had to carefully consider each probability. Then, as WebCrawler and Excite and AltaVista and people started, users got more used to scanning, they got more used to filtering out lots of junk. So the paradigm has completely changed from “find everything about my question” to “protect myself against overload of information”.  That paradigm shift requires you to have lived in a lot of information for awhile.

Gord: I was actually talking to the Chinese engineering team down at Yahoo! and that’s one thing I said. If you look at how the Chinese are using the internet, it’s very similar to North America in 99 or 2000. There’s a lot of searching for entertainment files and MP3s. They’re not using it for business and completing tasks nearly as much. It’s an entertainment medium for them, and that will impact how their browsing things like search results. It’ll be interesting to watch as that market matures and as users get more experienced, if that scanning pattern condenses and tightens up a lot

Jakob: Exactly. And I would certainly predict it would. There could be a language difference, basically a character set as we just discussed, but I think the basic information foraging theory is still a universal truth. People have to protect themselves against information overload, if you have information overload. As long as you’re not accustomed to that scenario, then you don’t evolve those behaviors. But once you get it… I think a lot of those people have lived in an environment where there’s not a lot of information.  Only one state television channel and so forth and gradually they’re getting satellite television and they’re getting millions of websites. But gradually they are getting many places where they can shop for given things, but that’s going to be an evolution.

Gord: The other thing we saw was that there was a really quick scan right to the bottom of the page, within 5 seconds, just to determine how relevant these results were, were these legitimate results? And then there was a secondary pass though where they went back to the top and then started going through. So they’re very wary of what’s presented on the page, and I think part of it is lack of trust in the information source and part of it is the amount of spam on the results page.

Jakob: Oh, yes, yes.

Gord: Great thanks very much for your time Jakob.

Jakob: Oh and thank you!