Brian Ussery noticed Google has changed the way you can share your SearchWiki notes in the search results. If you are logged in to Google and you have notes on search results, you can share those notes with friends. Here is how:

(1) Search on the query at Google and the results should show up with a link at the top to “share these notes”:

(2) Click the link and a URL will show up in a text box, copy and paste the link and send it to a friend:

(3) Here is a preview of that result for you to see:

Google’s SVP of Product Management Jonathan Rosenberg posted yesterday on the Google Blog, turning an internal memo into a public article. He used the occasion of the US President’s Day holiday to discuss Google’s sense of the political and social challenges of the moment as well as a vision for the future of search and the company. It’s very comprehensive and dense; there are some familiar sounding themes and there are some novel bits.

It’s long and I’m not going to do a deep dive on the piece (I’ll leave that to Danny if he wants). Instead I’ll pull out and comment on a few things that struck me. Rosenberg’s words are in italics, mine are in parentheses until my final thoughts at the bottom.

Ours is much more than a passing role in this next phase of history, rather we have the responsibility and duty to make the Internet as great as it can possibly be.

(The surrounding discussion preceding this statement implies that Google and the internet are synonymous for many people.)

More Internet-enabled phones will be sold and activated in 2009 than personal computers. China is a prime example of where these trends are coming together. It has more Internet users than any other country, at nearly 300 million, and more than 600 million mobile users — 600 million! Twenty-five years ago, Apple launched the Mac as “the computer for the rest of us.” Today, the computer for the rest of us is a phone.

(This reflects how seriously and strategically Google sees mobile; mobile is the future of the Internet for many people as Rosenberg points out.)

Why should a user have to ask us a question to get the information she needs? With her permission, why don’t we surf the web on her behalf, and present interesting and relevant information to her as we come across it?

(This implies some future mix of search personalization, behavioral targeting/recommendations and maybe alerts)

One thing that we have learned in our industry is that people have a lot to say. They are using the Internet to publish things at an astonishing pace. 120K blogs are created daily — most of them with an audience of one. Over half of them are created by people under the age of nineteen. In the US, nearly 40 percent of Internet users upload videos, and globally over fifteen hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute . . .

No one argues the value of free speech, but the vast majority of stuff we find on the web is useless. The clamor of junk threatens to drown out voices of quality . . .

Just like a newspaper needs great reporters, the web needs experts. When it comes to information, not all of it is created equal and the web’s future depends on attracting the best of it . . .We need to make it easier for the experts, journalists, and editors that we actually trust to publish their work under an authorship model that is authenticated and extensible, and then to monetize in a meaningful way.

(Crap content and spam threatens Google’s utility and usage over time; how does Google do a better job of separating authoritative and interesting content from garbage? This discussion of experts and quality is one of the most interesting bits in the post. It has implications for Google’s search results and algorithim and also struck me as a veiled reference to knol or initiatives like it.)

Within the next decade, people will use their computers completely differently than how they do today. All of their files, correspondence, contacts, pictures, and videos will be stored or backed-up in the network cloud and they will access them from wherever they happen to be on whatever device they happen to hold. Access to data, applications, and content will be seamless and device-agnostic.

(Rosenberg takes a couple of indirect shots at Microsoft in this section but is correct about the broad trend; however he acknowledges that the cloud isn’t secure or robust enough for enterprises yet.)

The overall gist of the article is that Google sits at the center of key social and technology trends: the Internet as all-purpose medium and data source, mobile and cloud computing as key near-term trends and a host of new applications using data and technology that help solve social problems and allow for new types of commercial transactions.

Interestingly Rosenberg doesn’t talk about free or cheap ubiquitous Internet access to facilitate all this.

Some of this is idealism that won’t come to pass and some of this is product roadmap that will. But it offers some interesting insights into where Google is placing big bets for its future.

Google Operating System discovered a new experiment Google is running named Preferred Sites. In short, users who are in this experiment will be able to add a list of sites in their search preferences page as their “preferred sites.” Google will then use that information to show those sites in a higher ranking order in the Google results for that user, when it makes sense. Let me share some examples of how this works.

If you set cnn.com to be a preferred site and you are logged in to your Google account and conduct a search for space station, Google may bump up a result from CNN to the top of the Google search results. In addition, Google will clearly label why it is the top result, with a “My preferred site” label before the page’s URL. Here is a screen capture:

Google explains that you must be part of the experiment to see this option in your search preferences. Personally, I do not see it. In addition, Google said you can be as specific as a subdomain, so if you want results from CNN, just use cnn.com, but if you want results only from money.cnn.com, you can do that as well.

This does remind me of the Google Coop, but it’s clearly different in that the results are not exactly tailored; they are promoted. In addition, this is an extension of Google’s SearchWiki.

For additional examples and screen captures, see Google Operating System.

A year ago today, I wrote about an experimental feature Google was showing off. I titled that article Google Like/Don’t Like: Move Results Up, Hide Them Or Suggest Your Own. Now it appears Google might be rolling the feature out, at least to a subset of Google searchers.

NOTE: THIS IS NOW LIVE FOR EVERYONE. SEE Google SearchWiki Launches, Lets You Build Your Own Search Results Page.

We have several blog posts across the web documenting them seeing these features in their Google web search results. Those blog posts include Justin Hileman, Garett Rogers, Alex Chitu, a German blog and my coverage at the Search Engine Roundtable, which documents a couple people noticing it in a WebmasterWorld thread.

How does it work? Justin Hileman has posted several screen captures and a screen cast movie. Below is the movie:

Google Operating System said all users can see traces of SearchWiki, by appending “&swm=2″ to the end of your search string. For example, google.com/search?q=google&swm=2.

The Google Video Blog announced the launch of personalized video recommendations based on your search history. To see them, make sure you are logged into Google and visit video.google.com. In the middle of the page, you should see, “Recommended videos.”

Google uses your past search history and your past video viewing history to compile your personalized video recommendation list. You can view up to six recommended videos at any time, and there is a next button to see more.

Here are my recommended videos:

Notice a couple from Matt Cutts, one on Linux and then a few on Jewish topics.

The Google Like/Don’t Like feature, where you can move up results, hide search results, or remove search results, seems to have been expanded to a group of test searchers.

We have reports from TechCrunch, Google Operating System, and Justin Hileman, with reports of users seeing this feature in the main search results. Justin does an excellent job taking us through each feature with screen shots.

I personally have never seen an implementation of this on any of my searches. But I know Google has been testing this over the course of the year.

Yesterday (technically still today my time), I did a keynote interview with Google vice president of search products & user experience Marissa Mayer during our SMX Sydney show. We covered a wide range of topics, including how "Previous Query" refinement will soon come to natural listings on Google, plus how Australia is to get StreetView mapping, Google testing how well Yahoo monetizes, how Orkut might have to be replaced in the US, and other topics.

Live blogging isn’t my thing, and live blogging when you’re asking the questions on stage certainly isn’t either. Heck, it’s tough enough to jot down notes of what was said. My recap below will be without a lot of direct quotes, but I wanted to highlight points I found interesting.

Previous Query

Last year, we covered (and here) how Google was changing the ads it displayed based on the previous query someone performed. For example, search for [spain] then do a new search for [travel], and you may notice how the ads will be targeted around Spanish travel (see also Google’s help page on this).

Google’s never given this feature a formal name, but Marissa said internally the company calls it "Previous Query," the first time to my knowledge that we’ve had some type of formal name put to it. Learn the name well, because Previous Query refinement is now coming to unpaid or "organic" search results, she said.

For example, if someone were to search for [spain] and then [travel] after that, BOTH the ads and the organic results will be altered to take the previous query into account. To some degree, it will be as if the second query was for [spain travel].

This is a big deal. Big deal. It means that the results for many "single word" queries, which can be hard for sites to rank for when billions of listings come back, will become queries involving two or more words — and much more specific ones.

When’s it happening? "Soon." Indeed, it’s already been happening for several weeks for some people randomly selected. Who will get it, when live? Everyone that accepts a cookie, meaning it’s not a personalized search thing that only happens if you’re logged in.

How could a user opt-out? Heh. I didn’t get to asking that, sorry. But I imagine any search where the + symbol is used before a word or words will override Previous Query.

StreetView Australia

Australia is to get StreetView mapping hopefully by the middle of this year, Marissa said. Cars have already been driving the roads in Australia for some time in preparation for it. See also this news article which picks up on privacy issues.

Google Testing Yahoo

I asked about the news that Yahoo would carry Google’s search ads, to the degree Marissa could comment about it. She remarked that it was a way for Google to test how well Yahoo monetizes. I thought this turn of phrase was important to note — that it’s not a Yahoo experiment, but a Google one. As I remarked in the story about Yahoo and AOL possibly merging, which we covered yesterday:

In my talk today at SMX Sydney with Google vice president Marissa Mayer, she noted that the Yahoo deal was a way for Google to measure Yahoo’s traffic and how well it monetizes. This is important. This is not just a Yahoo test – it’s a test for Google. And from that test, Google will better understand how much it could make in a crucial revenue guarantee to a combined Yahoo-AOL, which might help the deal move along and keep Yahoo out of Microsoft’s hands.

Other Points

It being so late here in Australia (coming up on midnight) and me being both jet lagged and short of sleeping, I’ll come back to some of other points in more detail later. But here are some fast hits:

• Not A Portal: The goal remains for Google to still get users off the site, rather than to try and host content that some feel is a way for Google to either be a media company or capture the "second click." But in some cases, Google hosts content because it feels otherwise, the content wouldn’t exist — or not as much would be out there. YouTube and Google Book Search were examples she gave.
   
• iPhone & Mobile: The iPhone in particular continues to show growth to mobile searches. Could Google tell how many use the iPhone to reach Google through the 2G cell network versus hotspots/wifi? Yes, and the traffic is roughly 50/50, off the top of her head.
   
• Social Search: Tapping into your friends to refine search results is an interesting idea but one that remains fraught with problems, as you probably don’t want to actually share some search results with friends. There are other issues, and she expects at the moment that this may be a minor signal used to influence results and more likely to suggest potential sites to visit.
   
• Orkut: She reiterated that the Orkut social networking site that Google runs remains strong worldwide. But she said that it might be that for the US and other key markets where it does not lead, the company might need to re-brand or build entirely new social networking services.

Postscript by Barry: Neerav Bhatt summarized his notes on the SMX Sydney conference as well.

Google has rolled out a new experimental feature that allows anyone to alter search results in the way they like. You can move good results higher, hide ones you think are bad and suggest your own.

Google was spotted testing this feature with selected users back in August and September, and then Googlified spotted it going live this week for anyone to use.

As you can see from the screen capture below, this new feature enables users to vote up a search result or completely remove a search result from the index.

Clicking the up arrow will promote the search result to the top spot for that keyword search and place an orange marker on that result to classify the result as being pushed up. Using the X icon will hide the result from being displayed.

Google explains:

This experiment lets you influence your search experience by adding, moving, and removing search results. When you search for the same keywords again, you’ll continue to see those changes. If you later want to revert your changes, you can undo any modifications you’ve made. Note that this is an experimental feature and may be available for only a few weeks.

Google launched Google Experimental Search in May of this year at where features such as Like/Don’t Like are made available for testing by anyone. You’ll also find these other features there:

• Alternate views for search results
• Keyword suggestions
• Keyboard shortcuts
• Left-hand search navigation
• Right-hand contextual search navigation

There is currently a lot of discussion around this discovery at Techmeme.

Following on last month’s search privacy video from Google, the Google Blog announced that a new installment dealing with personalized results is now available. Meanwhile, two new articles about privacy issues and naming Google in particular have also come out today.

The video discusses how Google can use your IP address, domain, or location to better personalize your search results. The video also shows how they can use your web history to do the same. Plus, the video ends with showing how you can pause Google from recording your web history, delete specific items in your history, or completely wipe out all your web history. Here is the video:

As for the articles, Global web privacy rules needed in 5 years: Google from Reuters covers more on the push for global privacy standards Google started earlier this month.

Seeking the key to web privacy from the Financial Times takes a look at a bunch of privacy issues in relation to search.

In the past two columns, I’ve featured the interviews (Part 1, Part II) of where search might go in the next three years. The two themes consistently mentioned as the most important for the future have been personalization and blended search results. Being a user-centric type of person, my first question was, “how will that impact the search user?” So, at Enquiro, we tried to shed some light on that question. We conducted an eye tracking study looking at interactions with Google’s Universal search results and we also created a mock up of what a personalized search page would look like. Today, I’d like to share a few of the findings with you. The full report, along with the interviews, is available in a whitepaper on our site.

Chunking of page rather than F shaped scan patterns

There was one fairly obvious difference we saw as soon as we compared a heat map from a typical blended result against the heat maps from a previous, pre-blended results. Our believe was that pictures would change the orientation point, leading to a distinctly different experience and this did appear to be the case.

In the pre-blended world (heat map upper right), there was very common tendency to orient in the upper left corner (indicated by A) and to start the scanning from there, first vertically (the down arrow) and then scanning across when a title catches your attention (the right pointed arrow).

But in the blended results (left heat map), you’ll notice that while there still is some scanning in the very upper left (B), it doesn’t appear that the scanning starts there. Instead, the orientation appeared to happen by the graphic thumbnail in the results (C), and then started from there. Scanning seems to be predominantly to the side and below (D). Could this push scanning down, moving the Golden Triangle down on the page?

In fact, the presentation of a graphic element high in the results such as the image of the iPhone in the results shown below seems to result in a mental division of the page, which we refer to as “chunking” the page. It seems we extend mental boundaries from the edges of the picture and divide the page up for further scanning. Here is the sequence of scanning that we observed when these conditions were present.

While we still seem to swing our eyes up to the upper left, we almost immediately (in under a second) move our eyes to the image (A) to determine if it’s relevant. A graphic image appears to be a powerful attractor to the eye. The tendency then is to determine if the listing beside the graphic (B) is relevant and unique in some way. Our brains tell us that because this listing has a unique treatment in the listings, it should be unique in some way. This is likely because universal results is still a new concept to us. Perhaps with time, we’ll become less sensitive to these listings. Regardless, at this point, we saw a tendency to scan this listing first. Then, because we still like to scan 3 or 4 listings before making our choice, we make our choice from the “chunks” above the image (C) and below it (D).

Rather than the top to bottom, left to right F shaped scan characteristics seen in the pre-blended world, we see more of an “E” shaped pattern, with the middle and first horizontal scan leg being where the image appears (see image above). The upper left top to bottom bias that was such a powerful factor in search behavior before seems to be lessened dramatically by the presence of an image.

Fencing of scanning

Another common behavior we observed was the “fencing” of scanning through the presence of images or graphic elements with straight sides.

It seems we like to extend these straight lines to form mental boundaries that we use to divide up the page for scanning. In addition to creating the scanning “chunks” described earlier, this also can have the effect of restricting scanning beyond the boundary. For example, look at the two heat maps above. In both cases, it appears the presence of an image created a “fence” that restricted scanning below it and led to greater scanning above.

This of course depends on a quick scan to determine whether greater scent exists above or below the fence. In a search results page, if there are enough listings above the fence (given that we like to have at least a few options to consider), it’s natural to assume that we’ll find greater relevance above than below. But the fact remains, the presence of a straight sided graphic element leads to the extension of those sides to create boundaries and once divided, we tend to determine scent of these sections as a whole, rather than scan each of the listings individually. This is the same behavior that leads us to dismiss the ads on the right side rail as a group after a quick glance at the first one, rather than scanning them individually. “Chunking” and the presence of these “fences” changes our linear scanning behavior, causing us to break the page up more.

From looking at the interactions with Google’s universal results set, it seems there are a couple of significant developments that could impact how we interact with search results. The presence of a graphic on the page engages us in a different manner than simply showing us text images. There are two factors at play here. First, as Jakob Nielsen pointed out, we “grok” images a lot faster. A quick glance is enough for us to determine the meaning of the image. But secondly, and probably more importantly, an image fires different parts of our brain. Reading text is a abstract, logical process, but images appeal to us at an emotional level. Recent studies have shown that although our brains process different types of information in parallel, emotional inputs are processed much quicker than rational ones. Something that touches our emotions proves to be a powerful attractor for the eye.

However, just being an image is not enough. It also has to offer information scent. The image has to be relevant to our intent. And, because it is an image, we can determine relevance very quickly. We can make an assessment of both relevance and attractiveness of an image in a split second and determine if it’s worthy of our attention. If it passes than test, than we will reward it with a more deliberate scanning. For example, look at the two examples at right. Images prove to impact scanning more in the earlier stages of the interaction, by attracting the eye and by doing so, creating a different scanning pattern. We never see a lot of heat on the image, because we don’t have to spend a lot of time to understand it, but we do see images exerting powerful pull on the eye.

We can determine relevance fairly quickly and if an image proves to be irrelevant, we quickly move on. For example, in the heatmap above, a query for “spice girls” (don’t judge us by the scenarios we use!) brought up a YouTube parody clip that proved much lest relevant than the listings above and below it. Although the image caught our attention, it didn’t keep it. Notice that there was little lateral scanning of the title or the description snippet. There was no information scent.

Compare this with the results for Apple’s iPhone. In this case, the image does prove to be relevant and attracts attention. This leads to scanning, and more importantly, early scanning of the result adjacent to the image. This is a classic example of an image providing information scent, drawing increased scanning of the adjacent listing.

The pull of Personalization

We also wanted to test for how personalization could impact the user experience. In this scenario, we broke the interaction up into two parts. First, we gave participants a chance to find out more about Apple’s iPhone. We didn’t restrict their online browsing, but we did track which sites they went to and which searches they did. Then, we used this information to mock up a search results page, for a second session, where we asked them to pick up where they left off in the first session and continue to find out more about the iPhone. We showed personalized results in organic positions 3, 4 and 5, tailored to where we felt the participant was in their cycle. The rest of the results were actual Google results.

It was interesting to compare interactions in organic positions 3, 4 and 5, our test positions for the personalized results, in our personalized mock ups and the non personalized sessions. These personalized results, even though we didn’t move them up into the top two organic positions, performed remarkably well. The chart below show percentage of gaze time, percentage of fixations and actual clicks in the non-personalized vs personalized results. In the heat maps above, we show the areas being compared, the first heat map being non-personalized and the second heatmap being the personalized results.

Obviously, for the test positions, personalization added a strong information scent component, with performance of these three listings doubling when compared to the non-personalized results. These three listings also pulled twice as many click throughs as the top two organic listings, a dramatic difference from the non-personalized results, where listings 3, 4 and 5 drew only one third as many click throughs as listings 1 and 2. Personalized results drew almost 4 times the clicks as the non-personalized results.

Now let’s look at what happens when we combine universal search results with personalized ones. The combination of universal results, and personalization, at least as we’ve represented it, produces a very interesting scan pattern that could have some significant implications for optimum placement of messaging on the page.

Perhaps the easiest way to show this is to first look at how a typical scanning pattern would play out before the introduction of universal and personalized search results: In the results set shown to the left, most users would orient in the upper left, just above (E). They would then start scanning down the page in a linear manner, first glancing at the top sponsored ads in Box “E”, then continuing down to the organic results in Box “C”. A consideration set would be chosen, likely consisting of the top two sponsored results and the top two organic ones, and the listing providing the best match of “scent” and intent would be chosen.

But let’s look at how the introduction of a graphic and 3 personalized results changes the scan pattern. Now, orientation happens on the picture and on the listing title immediately adjacent to it (A), and then the listing in Box B would likely be the first scanned. After this, the user would have to choose between the listings above and below. If personalization wasn’t present, we would assume the results at the top would offer greater scent, but if the personalized results benefit from personalization, this might not be the case. Attention would be drawn down (which seems to be the natural tendency of the eye) because of greater scent, present through personalization. We can see from the heat map below that the personalized results drew a significant amount of scanning attention away from the top of the page.

The introduction of a visually richer and potentially more relevant search results page will have a dramatic impact on how we scan that page. Prior to this study, we had seen remarkable consistency in scan patterns on Google, but a fair amount of variance in scan patterns between Google and Yahoo! and Microsoft. This was despite all three engines having a very similar layout, and was due primarily to small formating differences and how aggressive the engine was in showing top sponsored ads. But as the page becomes a more dynamic environment, we will adjust by drawing away from the top to bottom, left to right F shaped scan that produced the Golden Triangle to much more of a berry picking interaction that will vary according to the elements on the page. In the past, the definition of SERP real estate was fairly static: top and to the left. In the future, it seems it will be far more difficult to define.

Gord Hotchkiss is CEO of Enquiro, a search marketing firm that produces search engine user eye tracking studies and other research. The Just Behave column appears Fridays at Search Engine Land.