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?
I agree, from a branding standpoint, there's very little that differentiates a Google SERP from a Live SERP from a Yahoo SERP. Ask seems to be the only one that has this in mind with their UI currently. Purple is a unique color as well, which should help embed it in people's memory banks.
I sat on a purple couch at Yahoo! headquarters last week, though I'm not sure it had any effect on CTR.
More cowbell. Definitely more cowbell.
J/K -- interesting read. I personally like the purple GUI, but then again, I've lived with a rabid Prince fan for 16 years, and it may have induced permanent, violet-tinged brain damage.
I think someone hit upon a good suggestion a while back when talking about separating out wikipedia results. I'd actually like a little more segmentation, more like a dashboard of results. But I'm probably in the minority.
Yeah, I think the Purple Yahoo is a good User Interface. It is certainly nicer than some of their other GUI's.
It's interesting that there is no "perfect search results page". For some queries, a user would only want 1 precise result, for others they may prefer a list to compare.
For eample, someone searching for "supermarket" would probably want the store closest to them, while a person searching for "iPod" would probably want a price comparison, discussion forum, software hacks etc.
Do you think there's a catch-22 for the engines to improve their inverse time-on-page? It seems that they eventually reach a point where they don't want the user to leave so quickly, especially if they're measuring against an optimal exposure of their ads.
Content is already king in terms of time on page.
I do love the new Ask interface. It's just too bad that they don't have the data to back it up. Also, on the commercials, they have people searching for really mundane, stupid things like pictures and bios of celebrities. That certainly doesn't help perpetuate the image of an "Algo" that can help you find everything you need.
I'm sure that Yahoo, Google, and MSN will soon begin segmenting their SERPS, especially if (big if) Ask begins encroaching on traffic.
search for yahoo beta... u find lots of neat stuff.. kinda like a google labs