Why Being #1 is Important

Posted by nullbit on September 27, 2005, 3:14 am

Jakob Nielson has an interesting piece on a recent study [PDF] by Professor Thorsten at Cornell University, on search engines.

The main point of interest is the studies findings on the click through rates of the the competing top positions. The study found that 42% of users clicked the top result, and only 8% clicked the second result. They also found that if the researches secretly switched the top two listing, the top listing (which was formerly in second place) still had a relatively high 34% CTR, with the second result still only slightly higher than previously at 12%.

The study, and Nielson essentially conclude this behaviour to be mostly reflection of users' implicit trust in the search engine to serve the best result first, and plain laziness on the part of the user.

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