Google does, apparently, test everything

I was recently interested by a debate about why Google sticks its facets, and now its query refinements etc, at the bottom of the search results. The basic assumption that was proposed was that you only need to refine your results if you didnt get it in the first 10 results, which you probably did anyway right.

I thoroughly enjoyed a good chat with Daniel Russell today, about this decision. I can reveal that it is a very very very well tested decision. Not just a random design decision, as I perhaps naively assumed. Apparently, they even tested 5px variations of it on the x and y axis, as well as placing it above and below the first result of 10 and many more options combined. And their high volume studies decided right there, not 5px to the side, was best.

Apparently it doesnt stop there. Even the height, and shade of blue, of the horizontal bar above the results has a dramatic effect. The colour blue has been carefully chosen.

In some respects, I feel like my research ideas and focus have just been completely shattered into tiny shards. But I guess I am now all the better for knowing (or believe I know) how purposefully Google is how it is. And its just like Daniel Russell said in the recent IEEE special issue, there are some things that you can only study at their level, including tiny UI changes.

Not that they only test small changes it seems.

What is the smallest sensemaking problem?

Daniel Russell opens the CHI2009 Sensemaking Workshop with a question:

What is the smallest sensemaking problem? What is the very minimum that counts as sensemaking?

A lot of the challenges in this area are group planning problems, handoffs in hospitals, writing essays. These range from big to massive. Whats a small sensemaking problem?

CHI2009 Planning tool

Yesterday I released a planning tool for attending CHI2009. Its had 50 people actually use it in the first 24 hours, and I suspect many more visitors (I should be counting really).

Ive had plenty of feedback already, some improvements to make, but much praise too:

"Excellent Max! - Thanks a lot!"

"This is super! ... just having such a planner is a relief! I commend you for such a straight-forward solution."

"This looks great, can't wait to get home and put it on my PowerBook and iPod! Thanks so much for doing this!"

and many many more. I'm quite surprised by the response I've had. Its, of course, quite generic and easy to apply to another conference. So do contact me if you like. Otherwise enjoy and I'll see some of you at CHI!

Google tests more text with each snippet

Daniel Tunkelang has brought my attention to another blog entry about some of the tests that Google is carrying out at the moment. As well as letting you view timelines, and a 'wonder wheel' of connections, the options it lets you test include adding thumbnails to each search result (something that Ask.com has been doing for a while) and also allowing you to see more than 2 lines of text per result.

This last point is the one that seems rather interesting to me. I've heard many a search engine representative talk about getting as many results as possible above the fold (the point where you'd have to scroll to keep reading), and getting the best trade off, therefore, between context and space. Tim Paek et al, at Microsoft Research, studied the idea of flexible snippet lengths back at CHI2004. Its been a long time coming. I proposed back at a SIGIR workshop in 2007 that we just let people choose the size of the each snippet in the preferences, and see how often people change it - and to what? Maybe now we'll see.

Interestingly, in IEEE Computer in March 2009, Daniel Russell, of Google, wrote an article saying that, for some research, only big corporations with thousands of processors and millions of users can really test small UI changes, among many other things. Well I'm glad that Google is testing this - and I hope we see some results from it too.

google.com been giving term suggestions?

How long has google.com been providing this term suggestion on its interface? with the number of results its going to provide? They don't do it on google.co.uk. Fun fun.

What seperates query refinement, clustering, and faceted search?

I've been thinking recently about what seperates out the different interactive information retrieval techniques, as a term I am using loosely for now. There's interactive query refinement or expansion, which is often used to suggests potential changes to a query to explore sub-groups of the results. There's clustering, which analyses the results for clusters, in order to help users explore sub-groups of the results. And there's faceted search, which provides many different types of categorisation over the results in order to help users explore sub-groups of the results.

Each of these can be used to explore groups in the results, and they mainly differ by the back-end system that is used to label the sub-groups. They each also come with a typical interaction model. IQE usually sends a new query to the server and returns a new set of results. Clustering interaces, like Clusty.com typically allow users to choose one cluster at a time to view. Faceted browsers, like Flamenco or mSpace, typically allow users to apply and unapply a series of filters.

My question is how much of the effect is down to the method and which is down to the interaction model. Marti Hearst wrote a great article in the CACM that highlighted the advantages of faceted exploration over clustering, but the majority of her highlights are over quality of data produced, such as the completeness of categories produced.

It would be interesting to compare the specific effect of interaction style. Such as allowing users to apply and unapply a series of interactive query refinemements, rather than sending off new queries as a new starting point. The nearest I can think to research doing this is the work by Hoeber, which allows users to turn on and off query refinement filters on the list of results. The aim of such a specific study would be to analyse the benefit of implementing more increasingly complicated backends, instead of simply improving the interactivity of the search interface and the range of search tactics they support.

Concert for the deaf?

One of the most amazing people I ever had the pleasure of working with, is putting on a multi-sensory concert for the deaf. Her work on modelling the human cochlea is being tested as part of a audio-responsive chair in a live concert designed for the hearing impaired.

I'm sure it will be an amazing experience for both the gig-goers, the bands, and the researchers seeing their creative work in action!