Dan Russell from Google’s search quality team has a post at the Google Blog on the art of field study. In short, he describes how the search interface plays a role in search quality, and what measures Google takes to study and improve the user interface, to ultimately help improve search quality.

Dan mostly discusses how Google watches searchers and how they search. By watching and observing, they can find things, they might not otherwise find. User groups and test groups, with eye tracking studies is nothing new to search or the computer field. All major search engines run them and run them often. I have actually seen rooms devoted to studying how users use their search engines at both Google and Yahoos offices.

Dan explains that it is not uncommon to see “people trying to find out something about a topic, but then never actually mention the topic itself.” He then shared a short video of an eye tracking study done at Google, here is that video:

He also explained how Google came up with the revised advanced search page.

Related Topics: Google: User Interface | Google: Web Search

About The Author: Barry Schwartz is Search Engine Land's News Editor and owns RustyBrick, a NY based web consulting firm. He also runs Search Engine Roundtable, a popular search blog on very advanced SEM topics. Barry's personal blog is named Cartoon Barry and he can be followed on Twitter here. For more background information on Barry, see his full bio over here. See more articles by Barry Schwartz