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Eye Tracking Looks at How We Rely on Google for Answers

Posted on Mar 4, 2010 | 0 comments

Eye Tracking Looks at How We Rely on Google for Answers The Internet has changed the way we seek information. Up until the last couple decades, information was found in books or in the minds of those more knowledgeable about a subject than ourselves. But today, if you have a question, you just “Google it.” The seemingly all-knowing Google (or Yahoo, MSN, Bing, etc.) is where we go for answers. When you type a query and click the search button, a list of results appears and it is assumed that those on the top of the list are the most relevant. Search engines use complex ranking algorithms, which evaluate a combination of website characteristics like keywords, content quality, linking structure, authority, and a host of other secret ingredients, to present a list of search results ranked from most relevant to least relevant.

A study published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication entitled, “In Google We Trust: User’s Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance,” used eye tracking to examine the extent to which people put their trust in Google’s ranking algorithm to give them the most relevant content right at the top of the list of results.

To do this, the researchers had a group of undergraduate students perform a series of navigational and informational search tasks using the Google search engine. While they performed the tasks, their click behavior and eye movement, recorded with an eye tracker, were examined. The search results, which had been prejudged on relevance by a group of non-subjects, were presented in one of three conditions: Normal order; Swapped, with the #1 item and the #2 item switched; or the Reversed order, where the first was switched with the tenth, the second with the ninth, and so on. An Applied Science Laboratories 504 Eye Tracker was used to record fixation duration, fixation number, and pupil size with the purpose of measuring the cognitive workload (i.e. the difficulty and informativeness of the stimuli) as the information presented was processed, as well as the LookZones (i.e. where and in what sequence the items on the screen were looked at).

The results showed that search engine users (college students specifically) rely heavily on the order in which the results are presented rather than the actual relevance. There was no difference in numbers of fixations on the top two search results, even when the Reverse condition was in effect and the first two items on the list were actually the ninth and tenth relevant results. Based on the pre-study assessment of result relevance by the non-subject judges, if the first result was always clicked, it would be the actual most relevant 43% of the time.

We put a lot of trust in search engine results because they save us time and effort. Could you imagine having to manually sift through all the content on the Internet just to find the answer to a question? And even if you found an answer, how would you know it was from a reliable source? I wouldn’t be surprised if Google conducts its own eye tracking studies while formulating their top secret ranking algorithms to observe search result viewing behavior.

In Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance

Eye Tracking Looks at How We Rely on Google for Answers

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