Daniel Russell is a senior research scientist at Google. Click through for note from his presentation titled “How do People Use Search Engines?”

“Intuitions are terrible. In particular, your intuitions are terrible.”

Intuitions need testing in the crucible of reality.

Many different properties, many different idioms (some from aquisitions) and UI’s.

• must balance feature set and ease of use.

“3M” Points of View

• Micro Level
• Meso Level
• Macro Level

Meso: Field Studies get at qualitative properties of users

• Very uneven level of search skill
• Comfort level is VERY important

Micro: Eyetracking and Usability Studies look at direct behavior in lab setting

• no matter how good designers are, they can’t get everything right
• “if you live in the water, you can’t see the water”
• user does realistic tasks with a prototype
• some cases, take it to the field- studies at Epcot Center (”good demographics”… or fun diversion for testers?)
• interview after eye tracking session
• many people will quickly scan page, reassess search terms

Macro: Logs let us look at millions of user queries in aggregate

• lots of log data
• need to build a scalable data analysis system
• approach
• break data into shards, send out to parallel processors
• click through rate falls off sharply in first few results
• people will get stuck trying to reform queries word by word, where a more complete reformulation would often be better
• 20% of web browsing time is spent on searching

Need a combined approach at every resolution to understand the whole picture.

The more we know, the better we can do to help the search problem.

“Avoid the fallacy of the One True Way.”

“Reality is something very different from what see around see”

“Think outside of The Valley, because we are the minority.”