A Week In Digital
Search History added to Auto Suggest on Bing
Research shows 44% of non-navigational search sessions last longer than 1 week, which is why Bing has added previous searches into auto-suggest when searching for similar topics/queries over time.
Queries from search history will appear in purple, while other queries will show in blue. Searchers will be able to manage these suggestions via the “Manage History” and “History Off” options.
Google kills Search Wiki and replaces it with starred results
SearchWiki has been disabled. Users’ ability to re-order, remove, and comment on search results has been replaced by “stars” or “starred results”, which will allow users to bookmark preferred pages which will then appear above and completely seperated from the natural search results.
The reason? Tests showed people liked the idea of marking a website for future reference, but weren’t keen on reordering the organic search results.
Eye tracking test shows people aren’t using real time search results
An online marketing firm recently ran an experiment where participants’ use of real-time search results were analysed.
Participants were split into 2 groups, where a consumer group was asked to search for products to buy and an information forager group was asked to simply look for information on a product.
Results showed that 73% had never heard of real time search before the study and 25% of consumers cared for the real time search results compared with 47% of information foragers. Finally, surveys suggested participants werely mostly indifferent to the technology of real time search.
Google created a doc template for those of us who were betting on winners for the academy awards last night – when the document was sent to friends by email, they simply entered their name and selected their winner, which when returned to the sender was automatically imported into a Google spreadsheet for comparing data.
