Beantin

Google Social search: followers and follows

This week Google rolled out a new feature to it’s SERPs and snippets when logged in. If you have a Google Profile and Google has indexed who you are connected to, there’s a chance that you will see a small profile picture along with a name and the text “shared this on <someplace>”.

Eye tracking Google Instant

This week I did held a number of presentations and demonstrations of eye tracking user testing as part of Per Axbom’s course at Jönköping University. One of the tasks we tested was intended to show how people search using Google with Google Instant enabled.

We tested 6 people, all but one of them were students in their early 20s. The test environment wasn’t exactly how I’d normally set up eye tracking tests (being in a lecture room with 20-30 people watching on a projector screen while you try to solve the task will of course have an impact on the results!).

It’s always fascinating to watch people search - which is why I wanted to show the students a test involving a search engine and information foraging. This though was the first time I’d done any testing with Google Instant enabled.

No-one looked at the ads

Here are some quick findings.

• No-one paid any attention to any adverts. Not once. Not a single fixation on an advert during about 7 minutes worth of Googling by 6 people. What does that mean for paid search?
• When someone did stop typing for a moment to look at the Google Instant SERPs, they looked at the first result.
• Those that looked at the keyboard whilst typing didn’t see the Google Instant results at all.
• Results in positions 1-4 were, by and large, the only ones that received any attention.

Pulling out heap maps and the like from an Eye tracking test of Google Instant is awkward as the positions of each item in the SERPs varies depending on how many suggestions appear directly below the search box. Sometimes position 1 is where position 2 would be on a normal Google search without Instant enabled.

First result wins

You can see from the heat map above that there is a concentration of fixations around the search box, the instant suggestions, and then the first result. The first result can at times be an advert - but during this test no advert appeared in that position. Note the lack of fixations in the right hand column. Adverts regularly appeared there throughout the tests.

It’s worth noting that Google chose not to do any eye tracking testing of Google Instant before launch, claiming that they didn’t have time. Others have since found the time and published their findings.

The SERPs are more and more complicated

This was by no means a controlled test, and the sample size was just 6 people - but all 6 searched in a way that was clearly their normal and ‘natural’ way of searching. All of them had to solve the same task, and the task had a specific answer that they were unlikely to know before searching. Most of them hadn’t used Google Instant before, so perhaps their behaviour will change as they adjust their search techniques over time.

Nevertheless, Google Instant creates a whole load of issues, and has a varying impact on behaviour. Google search results were already complicated, but the addition of new features such as Instant and Preview during 2010 have pushed this complexity up to a whole new level.

Google’s broken date recognition

I don’t exactly know when it happened (probably an effect of the “May update” Michael Grey spotted the date problem during April), but Google has clearly got some problems with how they are currently deciding when a page was published.

Trick Google

Simon Sundén pointed out two weeks ago in this article on his Swedish blog that it was easy to trick google into showing any date you wanted in search result pages. Simon suggested that Google was giving extra weight to dates in titles and main headings. But Google’s problems appear to be even more wide-spread.

Google’s algorithm is currently making some really poor guesses as to the published dates of certain articles. Hans Kullin has today spotted that Google is changing correct dates in their search results for old articles from Swedish newspaper Aftonbladet to incorrect dates based on the date they happen to re-index the page.

Aftonbladet example

Let’s take this Aftonbladet article from March 2008 - Bojkotta inte Kina-OS!.

You can see from the date in the above picture that Aftonbladet are clearly saying that the article was published on the 20th March 2008.

When we search for that article, Google is telling us that it was published on the 27th of May 2010 (yesterday at the time of writing this).

Why though? Well, the first date that Google reaches when indexing the html of that article is indeed the 27th of May (as you can see in the above image). The date the article was published comes later on further down in the code. In addition, today’s date is repeated a second time in the code towards the bottom of the page.

The most reliable date?

Aftonbladet are showing today’s date at the very top of their left hand navigation. (and by the side of their search box in the page-footer) Google’s current broken way of establishing the date that an article was published is seeing this date and deciding that it is the most reliable date on the page.

Exploiting the problem

Hopefully Google will fix this. Given the importance and weight of recently published content, we’re going to see a lot of people exploiting this problem with Google’s date calculation algorithm in order to push their old content back up the search result pages.

Twitter chat: is this social media or black-hat SEO?

JesperAstrom: @beantin - yes. :) please write your perspective in a blog post and perhaps we could reach a conclusion?

Fri Apr 24 12:24:50 +0000 2009

beantin: @JesperAstrom yep, so we get back to a white-hat, black-hat SEO discussion rather than one about social media

Fri Apr 24 11:50:26 +0000 2009

JesperAstrom: @beantin - yes. But how does it effect the serps?

Fri Apr 24 11:35:24 +0000 2009

beantin: @JesperAstrom Not 100% sure either. Heart (and head?) says interesting content travels naturally within social media world.

Fri Apr 24 11:33:11 +0000 2009

JesperAstrom: @beantin - I c your point. And I am unsure. It is border-line. I know. But is it unethical you think? I weigh relvance vs. technical imp.

Fri Apr 24 11:25:04 +0000 2009

beantin: @JesperAstrom Don’t get me wrong Jesper, it’s a great technical post! I enjoyed it. It was the ethical side that made me uneasy.

Fri Apr 24 11:18:43 +0000 2009

JesperAstrom: @beantin - It says - releasing news THROUGH social media. It is - as I say in the post - NOT social medias best usage :)

Fri Apr 24 11:13:19 +0000 2009

beantin: Reading: “Releasing News through Social Media” by @JesperAstrom bit.ly/TpLNW Gut reaction: is this social media or black-hat SEO?

Fri Apr 24 10:40:23 +0000 2009