SEL: Study Finds Strong Bias Towards Selecting Top Search Link

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September 27, 2005

Study Finds Strong Bias Towards Selecting Top Search Link

A recent Cornell study sought to explain why users click on the top hit in a search engine results page. They secretly switched the first and second place results and found little difference in how many people clicked the first position.

Jacob Nielsen suggests that either users think that:

* Search engines are so good at judging relevancy that they almost always place the best hit on top.

or that

* Users click the top hit not because it's any better, but simply because it's first. This might be due to sheer laziness (after all, you start from the top) or because users assume the search engine places the best hit on top, whether that's actually true or not.

It's nice to have some actual data on this, though it's pretty, uh, common sensical.

I'll quote Gary Price's reaction to the data, "I've said time after time here on the blog that the search engines should do more to help teach people (especially certain user groups) to be better searchers, go beyond the defaults, and formulate better queries from the outset."

Garrett French - MarketSmart Interactive | permalink | +marktd |

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