Usability

If you have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser, you may soon start seeing some odd behavior at times when you click on a search result. For some pages, Google might deliver you to a page and may display a popup/information box on the bottom right of the page that covers part of the … Read more

A paper by Google researchers Anne Aula, Rehan M. Khan, and Zhiwei Guan published last month asks the question How does Search Behavior Change as Search Becomes More Difficult? (pdf) The paper describes two studies in which participants were given informational tasks to perform – a mix of hard and easy questions – to see … Read more

We’re not often given too much insight directly into how a search engine like Google might check on the quality of their search results, and the algorithms that achieve those results. When we are, it can be interesting to look at some of the processes that their researchers might use, the assumptions that they follow, … Read more

How much might the usability of a web page matter to a search engine? If that search engine were to look at an approximation of the layout of a web page, it could try to understand how good of a user experience visiting that page might be, and evaluate the page based upon certain characteristics … Read more

At SIGIR 2007, one of the workshops held at the July Conference in Amsterdam was on Web Information Seeking and Interaction. Web information seeking and interaction involves looking at the way that searchers interact with Web-based content and applications when they are looking for something. The conference covered a wide range of research, and I … Read more