However, supposedly all these things that currently exist on the web page have already been A/B tested and proven successful. So another of my ongoing questions about how search engines work is how a page can become so jazzy that users start to not like it, but that every single change to that page has been successfully tested, meaning that users do like it?

That seems like an obvious contradiction to me, and I don’t really understand it.

Quote: “One thought I’ve had is that maybe Google is introducing these new elements as a means of forcing users to do less scanning. Google makes money if people click on ads. The less the Google page changes, the easier it becomes for users to scan through information. The more users scan, the less they pay attention to ads. So, possibly Google is trying to break up the typical visual pattern as a means of driving users back to clicking on ads.”

Thanks for the clarification, I think I understand where you are coming from now. So yes I think there is a tension, if you think of it in purely economic terms, the more searches you run before clicking an ad the more you eat into the profit margin the search engine makes on that ad. That may sound very small when you think of the scale of the large search engines out there, but if everyone suddenly had to run twice as many searches to get to an answer there would be a significant impact. And I am not even thinking of exploration here.

Perhaps I should have been more clear. In Exploratory Search, your answer doesn’t necessarily come in the form of a single page or ad. One page or ad might actually be the best option, but even when you see that page or ad, you won’t know it unless you’ve had the chance to engage in comparison and contrasting, i.e. exploratory search.

And so if all I am getting back from the search engine is a list of ads (and pages), if that is the only process that is supported by the search engine, then that process/result itself is already not a good answer, no matter what ad is actually contained on the page. Why is it not a good answer? Because my goal, again, isn’t to find any one single page or ad. It is to compare and contrast and summarize and understand the relationship between all the various pages and options.

Stated another way, the best answer (or even the most satisfactory answer) doesn’t become the best answer until the user has had a chance to explore. So again, for information needs like purchasing a dvd player or buying a plane ticket, the goal of the search engine is to get the user off of the search page as quickly as possible. This does seem to conflict with the user’s goal of exploration, no question about that. But where I am curious is whether the search engine business model has anything to do with either (1) setting up, or (2) perpetuating, that conflict.

What do you think?