Eye-tracking study from Microsoft yields interesting results

The study below suggests that you need to aim for the Top 5 in search results, rather than Top 10.

The study also suggests that if you are looking to find a specific website based on a term (find the Comfort Inn), short text snippets are most effective in the search result list. This is called navigational searching. If you are looking for a specific piece of information (when did the Titanic sink), longer text snippets from search results result in better accuracy.

clipped from research.microsoft.com MSR-TR-2007-01 Eye tracking in MSN Search: Investigating snippet length, target position and task types Edward Cutrell; Zhiwei Guan January 2007 13 p. Available Documents: PDF 645 Kb Web search services are among the most heavily used applications on the World Wide Web. Perhaps because search is used in such a huge variety of tasks and contexts, the user interface must strike a careful balance to meet all user needs. We describe a study that used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. We found that adding information to the contextual snippet significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks. We discuss possible reasons for this difference and the design implications for the better presentation of search results. The studies reported here are to be published in CHI 2007. Keywords: Web search, eye tracking, contextual snippets, target position, user studies