The Secret of Google Instant: Behavioral Psychology

It's possible that Google borrowed a few principles from behavioral psychologists when building Google Instant in order to get people to search more. They have 5 'suggested results' as a maximum for a reason (in the previous version they were 10), and we suspect it has to do with psychological principles. Also, they have done their best to reduce every possible effort the searcher takes in order to get what he's looking for. Will this result in more queries, and more importantly, more loyal searchers for Google? We look at the potential below. Take a look at the following screens. This is what will happen if I type the letter M on Google with Instant off and then with Instant turned on: What's the main difference here? On screen 1, in order to start searching you need to a) type a query b) click enter c) wait for results to display d) see results. On screen 2, in order to start searching you need to a) type a query (often an incomplete one since Google will start suggesting and assuming what you wanted and display results right away) b) wait for results to display c) see the results. No pressing "Enter", no waiting for results after pressing "Enter" and, often, not writing the complete query (a gift for slow-typing users). As you can see, Google Instant saves you decent amount of time when searching. Time you can use for...searching again! But speculations aren't the point of this article. The point is to explore, with evidence, how the new Google will make you search more on Google overall. 1. Google Suggested Results - Makes a BIG Difference Can you notice the difference? In the old Google (without Instant), the maximum number of suggested results you were displayed is 10. In the new one, it is 5. So how is this going to make you search more? Allow me to introduce the phenomenon known as the paradox of choice. This principle simply states: The more options you have to choose from, the less likely you are choose those options. There's a huge body of evidence for this. This article and this video outline some studies that were done on this field. The thing is, too much choices leads to paralysis: You don't want to get your decision wrong if it's for all eternity :) How does this apply to Google Suggest? It's not that they changed the suggested results overall, as you can see from above, the first 5 suggested results are the same on both pictures. They just shortened the options from 10 to 5. Which probably resulted in more people choosing from those suggested options (remember, as a rule of thumb, the less options people are given, the more they choose). I would guess Google experienced around 10-30% improvement in people choosing the suggested options after making this minor change. Less Effort = More Searches = Bigger Loyalty? As we saw earlier, Google Instant saves you quite of effort while searching. It's very well-known in the 'conversion rate optimization' industry that the less effort a prospect needs to take while registering or buying a product (like leaving his phone number upon registration or entering his age or some other extra data while buying), the more he's likely to register/buy. I don't think we need a study to show that the less effort people need to take to do something, the bigger the chance is they are going to do that thing (and also, do it more than once). So Google Instant improvements should result in people doing more searches (if you combine the minor modification for suggested results + the fact they need to take less effort). There's also some evidence that reducing customer's effort leads to bigger loyalty. The study done was for customer service departments but I don't see any reason why the same principle doesn't apply to Google as well. If peoples 'job to be done' on Google is to find information and every piece of action you take to reach your final destination constitutes as 'effort', then removing any effort people make in the way should result in them being more loyal and using the product more. All of this might take a while, though, because habits don't change overnight. Google probably expects the results of their efforts within 30-60 days. Exciting times for the search team indeed. Darko is an editor on Findermind.com, his latest post on 25 Free People Search Engines outlines various websites you can use for finding people online.

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The Secret of Google Instant: Behavioral Psychology

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