A thread in the comments section over on Daniel’s blog prompted me to think about the issue of ranked list results presentation in a new manner. How do we decide how far to scroll down a ranked list of results, or when to switch and try a different search query or even a different search engine?
When a search engine gives you nothing but line after line of results, it doesn’t matter if those results are segmented into pages of 10 or 100, or are infinitely scrolling. You constantly are faced with the choice of whether or not you should go further in the results to find the information that you seek. Having 2.7 million results come back as result to your query means that you are faced with 2.7 million choices. You look at the 1st result and then have to decide whether you want to go on to the 2nd result. You look at the 2nd result and have to decide whether to look at the 3rd, and so on.
Recent Comments