Spotted via Resource Shelf, a new paper from Microsoft Research focusing on user eye tracking behavior while viewing MSN search results. The study used eye tracking methodologies to explore the effects of changes in the presentation of search results. Among the interesting findings: Adding information to result snippets significantly improved performance for informational tasks but degraded performance for navigational tasks.

Links to the abstract and the full-text PDF report.

Postscript From Danny: See Study Says Get In Top 5 Not Top 10 & Search Engines May Need To Highlight Official Sites from me that does a deep drill down on this study.

Related Topics: Channel: Consumer | Microsoft: Bing

About The Author: Chris Sherman (@CJSherman) is a Founding Editor of SearchEngineLand.com and President of Searchwise LLC, a Boulder Colorado based Web consulting firm. He also programs and co-chairs the Search Marketing Expo - SMX conference series. See more articles by Chris Sherman

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