For a presentation, we collected some statistics on user behavior on search.ch and I thought it might be interesting to share this with a wider audience on this blog. Also, Tim Bray's second article on search technology provides some commentary on this kind of data, as it probably more or less similar for all public search engines.
| Words | Share of Queries |
|---|---|
| 1 | 53.0% |
| 2 | 30.3% |
| 3 | 11.8% |
| 4 | 2.9% |
| 5 | 1.2% |
| 6+ | 0.7% |
Tim quotes an average length of 1.3 words for queries. On search.ch we have a slightly higher average of 1.7 words, but it is still true, that the single word query is still the most popular way of using search engines and that a lot of optimization efforts have to go in this kind of query.
| Position | Share of Clicks |
|---|---|
| 1 | 57.0% |
| 2 | 12.3% |
| 3 | 7.9% |
| 4 | 4.8% |
| 5 | 3.5% |
| 6 | 2.7% |
| 7 | 2.1% |
| 8 | 1.6% |
| 9 | 1.6% |
| 10 | 1.5% |
| 11-20 | 2.6% |
| 21+ | 2.4% |
The first page counts. Users rarely click to the second page in hope to find better results, they tend to issue a refined query instead. I think that in many of the cases, when someone goes to the later pages, he or she actually wants to get a deeper overview of everything that matches this query (as opposed to scanning for the fewer relevant hits).
| Results | Share of Sessions |
|---|---|
| 10 | 91.7% |
| 20 | 3.7% |
| 30 | 1.8% |
| 40 | 0.8% |
| 50+ | 2.3% |
Quite telling is the statistic of the share of clicks each result position yields. Actually, this data is a little aged since I have to turn on redirects on the results, which I don't want to do too often. Anyway, you can see that the action is really concentrated on the top spots. The top three get more than 75% of all the clicks.
I think, this emphasizes how much you should care for the ranking in your search and search-like components on your sites. The search slot metaphor is popular in the users' mind and they expect that the first match is the most important. So, if you sort your matching products alphabetically, you probably miss more potential than you think. With bad luck you might be even presenting an out-of-print item as your top result...
Posted by seefeld at June 19, 2003 23:35