Search Results: 65% of Users’ Attention goes on First Three
According to a 2004 eye/click tracking study (Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search) done at Cornell University on Google results page, users spend about 50% of the time on the page reading the snippet of the first and second results, and 14% to read the third one.
Here is the percentage of time spent reading the snippets compared to the percentage of clicks done on the results.
eye clicks
1 28.43% 56.36%
2 25.08% 13.45%
3 14.72% 9.82%
4 8.70% 4.00%
5 6.02% 4.73%
6 4.01% 3.27%
7 3.01% 0.36%
8 3.68% 2.91%
9 3.01% 1.45%
10 2.34% 2.55%
The eye-tracking data can be especially useful for who is trying to train a relevance/ranking system and uses Discounted Cumulative Gain as metric.
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