Why the Search Industry Makes Money
Jakob Neilsen has a very good AlertBox article (subscribe to the newsletter right away if you don’t already) describing a user’s propensity to click on the first listing on a search engine result page compared to the second.
The article is based on a Cornell University study [PDF] that found that users clicked on the first result most of the time. When they served the search engine results unchanged they found that 42% of users clicked on the first result, 8% clicked on the second and the other half clicked somewhere else.
They then flipped the results and showed the second result first, and the first result second. Surprisingly (or not so) 34% clicked on the first result (which was really the second one), 12% on the second result and 54% elsewhere. Confused?
Basically it finds that people are lazy. Or trusting. Or that the top two search engine results are really not that much more relevant than each other. Or all of the above.
While it is inevitably a combination of all three, I think it has more to do with the last factor: that there is not that much marginal difference in the relevancy of the results. That is the reason why search engine marketing works. The paid results are, on average, not that much less relevant than the top organic results. Sometimes they are more so. Put them high enough and users will click on them.
