Tom Dalton :: Doer of Good

Oh. Somebody did my scariest idea for a search engine study, and they did it much more cleverly. I wanted to know -- what percent of people click on the #1 ranking, versus #2, etc. and if that varies by search engine. Which search engine is the most relevant? (That was the key question, in my mind.)

The horrible plan I was fomulating was to get access to Omniture's SiteCatalyst tracking data and measure clicks to various companies' landing pages. Then I'd correlate that data with historical records of the landing pages' rankings in various search engines. That would give me a broad, real-life snapshot. (For example: Company A got 71 clicks to their landing page for Keyword B last month. Keyword B was ranked #2 on MSN. Keyword B was searched for 1100 times on Overture.)

There is so much error in that -- from all the assumptions, from uncategorizable traffic sources, and who knows what else -- but it could be a very, very large scale study.

Professor Thorsten Joachims and colleagues at Cornell University did a much more elegant study: they tracked a sample of users on Google. They showed that 40% of people click on the first result -- and even if you switch the results, 34% of people still click on the first result.

The implication: People are strongly conditioned to click on the first result.

My response: Let me replicate that study, for MSN and Yahoo, and lets see which one gets the best score! Or which one has the most sheep-like users. Hee hee.

Read more for the full paper reference. >>