"He that hates
gifts shall live" (Proverbs 15:27)
Google collected the best of the world's
computer engineers, and they are working night and day, for many years, slowly
and methodically, using the most advanced methods, in order to increase
Google's revenues . Every element on the results page is a masterpiece of deception
that passed the test of billions of
people. [1]
At the top of the results page, under
the search words, in bright black letters,
appear the number of results.
To its Right, in brackets, in smaller
dark black font - an indication of the duration of the search.
Every results page has ten results.
Every result has a blue title
Green link beneath it,
Date beneath it,
Followed by a snippet, which is a
summary of the proposed document. The Snippet has usually two lines.
Inside the snippet in bold letters show
the keywords the user typed.
Google's results page is full of
deliberate diversions, elements which are wasting the user's time, obstacles
placed on his way to the answer he is looking for.
The number of the results and the
duration of the search are interesting for the engineers at Google
but not for the surfer.
The title is not meant to be
relevant. It is designed to allow the surfer to reach the document from which
the snippet was taken. After exiting from any document the title changes color,
in order to prevent the user from re-entering the document he already visited.
The title of the sponsored links and of the organic links look identical
(there's a tiny square with the word Ad in front of the sponsored links). It is
designed as a trap that forces the user to click on the sponsored link, which
is less relevant, but is placed before the organic link2]].
The colored link is irrelevant -
it is not designed to be read.
The date is irrelevant - it
certainly is not that important to be placed at the top of the snippet.
The number of results does not
help the surfer to understand the answers. The hundreds, thousands and millions
of results that are waiting for him on the following pages just confuse and
frighten him [3]. A typical surfer sees only the first screen, and not even the
entire results page, ie, the first five results [4].
Each result has colorful letters and
black letters on a white background. As we know, colorful letters attract more
attention than black and white letters [5]. If
the snippets were colorful and all the rest of the text was in black on
white, we could understand that the main thing is the information, while the
title and the link are less important, but the color is dedicated to the title
and the link, and the impression is that they are meant to separate the
results, and that the purpose of the result it to navigate outside by clicking
the title.
Even the result that Google ranks first,
because it is the most relevant, leads to a document that has, generally, many
paragraphs, but only few of them are relevant and contain the keywords typed by
the user.
Google's snippet is too short [6] and
fragmentary, and it does not allow the surfer to best decide whether he should
surf to the proposed document.
Notes
====
[1]
[2]
Ads Tied to Web Searches Criticized as Deceptive
Federal Trade Comission Has Pressed Google, Yahoo, Microsoft to Comply With
Requests to Highlight Paid Links
[3]
"the affective symptoms of uncertainty,
confusion, and frustration prevalent in the early stages were associated with
vague, unclear thoughts about a topic or problem". Inside the Search
Process: Information Seeking from the User’s Perspective by Carol C. Kuhlthau,
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE. P. 368... “Uncertainty
is in the head but anxiety is in the pit of the stomach.” The whole experience
of users
affects their information use, their
feelings as well as their intellect, particularly in the exploration stage. P.
370.
[4]
"The importance of the first
results screen has two reasons. Firstly, users seldom look beyond the first few
results..." Source:
[5]
Source: Lamberski, Richard J., and
Francis M. Dwyer. "The instructional effect of coding (color and black and
white) on information acquisition and retrieval." ECTJ 31.1 (1983): 9-21.
[6]
Cutrell, E. and Guan,
Z. 2007. What are you looking for?: an eye-tracking study of information usage
in web search. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (San Jose, California, USA, April 28 -May 03, 2007). CHI '07.
ACM, New York, NY, 407-416. the
"The authors
examined the effect of varied snippet lengths in search result pages, using
gaze data to determine the order...They concluded that longer snippets enhanced
performance on information tasks".
