GOOGLE EYE-TESTING FOR USABILITY OF SEARCH

Post on the official Google blog about using eye tracking studies to best position search results.

http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/02/eye-tracking-studies-more-than-meets.html

An interesting part of the article revealed that Google's researchers have found that a lot of decisions made on Google's searches are made unconsciously, after a preliminary scanning on results that happens almost instantaneously. This reminded me of some of the discussions in Malcom Gladwell's book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. A good read for this kind of "unconscious decision" stuff.

Further, it's interesting to see how usability/user experience testing is obviously a huge investment for Google searches.