Poster

Analyzing the architecture of Google through eyetracking: discovering where users look on a Google results page?

Jason Holmes, David Robins, Aaron Rosenberg

In this poster, we will present findings based on eyetracking users as they accomplish a search task using Google. The basic questions we ask is: Where do users look on a Google results page?

In our analysis, we partitioned the Google results page into three distinct Areas of Interest (AOI). AOIs for the Google search page include: top sponsored link, right sponsored link and organic links. The total gaze time per person for each AOI was gathered.

Our findings suggest that people have a tendency to look mainly at the organic search listings. We found that the average subject spent 70% of the gaze time on organic searching, 15% on the right column sponsored links and 15% on the top sponsored link.

Further analysis shows that this trend (70%-15%-15%) is not a group effect but rather remains remarkably consistent across each subject.