Mystery Guest and I were running some queries on Yahoo! earlier this afternoon, when we received my personal favorite search results UI test pages, the beloved Purple Yahoo!.
Purple Yahoo! is a rare beast, from what I’ve seen. This is only the second time I can remember being served the results, though I know others have seen it before (Barry caught it back in May). The last time I saw Purple Yahoo!, I was on the east coast, and I remember wondering whether the mystical SERPs would make their way west. My guess is that Yahoo! probably sees lower CTRs on ads with the GUI change, but that could just be speculation. In any case, I did manage to grab some screenshots:
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This query for “superbad” was super-awesome
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Yahoo! dishes up some sweet running back action for Shaun Alexander
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Purple Yahoo! shows off query expansion (and muppets SERPs)
Search engine UI testing is nothing new, and I thought along with sharing some colorful screenshots, I’d try to dive deeper into the goals of the search engines’ quest for the perfect search results format.
For the engines, there’s a few metrics that are critical:
- Differentiation – particularly for Yahoo!, MSN & Ask
- Branding – the engine wants you to remember that good search experience you had was with their brand
- CTR – not just on the paid ads, but on the organic search results, instant answers style results and query expansion options
- Time on Page – this might be an inverse variable, as the best search results should drive the visitor to the page as quickly as possible
- User Satisfaction – although tough to measure remotely, this is the ultimate goal of the engines – to engender happiness among searchers who’ll come back again and again to use the site. The user interface plays a critical role in satisfaction; a perfect example is an experiment that was run several years back (which I can’t seem to find record of online) in which Yahoo! and MSN had their results displayed inside Google’s UI frame (logo and all). If memory serves, the testers found that users overwhelmingly preferred results inside Google’s UI shell, even when there was no substantive difference between the listings (sort of like the study with kids and McDonald’s hamburgers).
Since none of the engines are likely to reach a “perfect” results page (just as many of us will never craft the “perfect” PPC ad), we should expect to see more cool tests in the future.
While we’re at it, why not tell the engines what you’d like to see more (or less) of in the results? Any design suggestions for the UI crews out there?
