Gunning for Google

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Designers track where users' eyes go—here on the former AskJeeves site—producing heat maps where red indicates longer periods of focus.

On the re-designed and re-branded Ask search site, users adjusted their focus to the middle of the page where the new layout shows results.

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Too Much Distraction?

A richer experience isn't without risk for search providers. Graphics and video could distract from the lucrative, but typically understated, text ads Google and others count on for revenue. Incorporating more graphics into what has typically been an austere, top-down collection of links could change the dynamics of advertising on the page by distracting from relevant results—and driving away users. "You have the potential to distract people by creating a certain amount of noise," says Greg Sterling of Sterling Market Intelligence, a consulting and research firm.

Jakob Nielsen, co-founder of the usability consulting company Nielsen Norman Group, and a widely respected Web design expert, says that search results work well when they're a combination of link results and relevant ads. According to Nielsen, the design of text-based search ads works: They often directly correspond to a user's problem or search query. Text doesn't invoke "banner blindness," the instinct to ignore flashy, distracting, and often irrelevant graphical ads.

Nielsen's research shows that users typically look at top text ads on Google's results page for two seconds. While that may not seem like much, on other, non-search, Web sites, users typically look at graphical advertising for one-tenth that amount of time, if at all. More complexity, Nielsen says, "violates Google's principle of search and go."

Careful Study of Users

How ads will evolve within the new search environment is a question that remains unanswered. For the moment, text-based ads have not changed. Sterling says Google has hinted at coming changes but is, for the moment, remaining tight-lipped. "They've implied you might see graphical ads," he says. "But the timing and what that would look like remains unclear."

Search designers aren't making changes without prior study and analysis. Laura Kern, the group program manager for user experience for Microsoft's search products, acknowledges that folding new features into the search results page without upsetting users' expectations—and potentially driving them away from the site—is a delicate operation.

During 12 months of testing of the company's new design, Kern's team of engineers tested a prototype layout which indented the most relevant results on the page. Users promptly ignored the indented text, which didn't jibe with a traditional results-page layout. "By moving content 12 pixels," says Kern of the miniscule change back, "we improved click-through rates by 30%."

All in One Place

Still, it's unclear how users will react to more combinations of text and image in their search results. Larry Cornett, Yahoo's vice-president of user experience, says its richer interface is intended to help users avoid "pogo-sticking," or clicking from a results page to another site and then clicking back to find other, more accurate results. According to Cornett, only 15% of search users in the U.S. typically find what they're looking for on the first attempt, often performing three or four searches before they do.

Blended results, which in Yahoo's case pull content from its other Web properties like Flickr and social calendar site Upcoming, can help avoid multiple searches, he says, by providing in one place content that would otherwise be spread across multiple pages.

Ask's has perhaps been the most radical redesign, moving away from the established look of search results. Its 3D look remixes a traditional results page by separating content into three distinct sections, one on the left for related queries, a center area for results, and a right-hand bin for additional content such as images and films, dictionary definitions, or local listings.

Retraining the Eyeballs

Daniel Read, Ask's vice-president of user experience, claims users have taken a shine to the new, quirky design. Internally produced "heat maps," digital prints by which Ask monitors where users' eyes are focused, show that searchers have adjusted their focus from the top right hand side of the screen to the center of the page where then new results now reside.

"We wanted to ask, can you break the traditional paradigm of search interface," says Daniel. "These maps show you can." Read adds that reaction to the design helped Ask's scores on the University of Michigan American Customer Satisfaction Index, a leading quarterly survey of consumer satisfaction, jump 5.6% from 71 in 2006 to 75 in 2007. It was the highest percent increase in customer satisfaction of any online company.

As users fire up newly minted and redesigned search interfaces, Google's brand power remains. Its entrenchment as the go-to search engine of choice remains hard to counter. "There's a lot of loyalty and identification there," says Sterling. Still, Google's current conservatism—with the most to lose, its design has changed the least—could create an opening for smaller outfits willing to take a chance on more graphically rich interfaces that just might wow and win over new users.

Matt Vella is a writer for BusinessWeek.com in New York.