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March 09, 2005
Where they look
In his review of an article on how people read Google results pages, Darren Barefoot writes that he, "Never, ever look[s] at the ads."
On the one hand, the search in that image was for "digital camera" cheapest, so scanning the ads makes a bit more sense than when you search for "Directory Server 5" nsslapd-cachememsize. (Huh, that set of results came up ad free. Nobody wants to sell me extra memory?)
On the other hand, as Carole explained, those ads aren't for us. There are lots of people out there who still literally see the formatted content of a web page without preinterpreting it. My guess is that results of a study on people who ever think about website design or even just write web pages would show a different scan pattern.
Posted by Mark at March 9, 2005 09:35 PM