We continuously try to improve our best practices around site search. Recently we’ve been looking at layout options. Specifically, which is the best layout grid or list.

The grid view is more compact and so allows you to show more products above the fold. It is potentially easier to browse through many results using this format, particularly if the images adequately summarize the results. On the other hand, the list view gives you more room to show additional information about each product. In particular you can show descriptive text, related information and add to cart buttons. The text gives you an opportunity to further entice the user to click on the result. If you highlight the search term then it provides a strong information scent indicating that the result is relevant for the given term.

It’s interesting to look at how the distribution of clicks varies between the two different options. This chart shows the number of clicks that occur at each rank when the results are ordered in a list view.

As expected the top ranked result gets the majority of clicks and this falls away fairly quickly. This particular client has 10 results per page. This is reflected in the chart in that the 11th result gets significantly less clicks than the 10th result because a lot of people don’t visit the 2nd page of results. You can also see that the 10th result gets about the same number of clicks as the 9th. I suspect this is because it is at the bottom of the page and easier to find than if it were the 10th result in a long list. For some customers we see the result at the bottom of the page get more clicks than the result 2nd from the bottom.

Contrast this with results that are shown in a grid view (in this case 3 rows of 4 results):

Here you can see that the number of clicks doesn’t fall away as fast as they did in the list example above. Interestingly the 5th result (which is below the 1st result) still gets less clicks that the 4th result (which is at the end of the first row). I had though it might get more if a reasonable amount of people scanned the list vertically. However this supports the premise that the results are scanned from left to right.

Our customers are reasonably evenly split between showing the results in the grid and list views. Many of them allow the users to switch between the two. Our analysis indicates there is no significant difference in the conversion rates of the two formats.

So which should you use? The charts above summarize the activities of thousands of people. My advice is to ask some of them and if possible test the alternatives. Personally, when I’m searching I prefer to have more information on the search results page because that makes it easier to make a decision without having to click through. That saves me time.

Following on from my earlier post speculating that there are way more site searches than web searches. Why is it that we hear so much less about site search? Both site search and web search are important for a site owner - web search helps drive people to the site, while site search helps people find what they want on a site. With more people using site search than web search, it is arguably more important.

I think the reason site search gets less coverage in the press is because there are no big players to focus on. Web search is dominated by Google, Yahoo, MSN, and Ask. The average user knows these brands and feels an impact if they change the way their search works. What’s more the investment community follows these companies closely because they account for the majority of revenue associated with web search.

On the other hand the responsibility of site search is spread across all web sites. There are a handful of vendors, such as SLI who are responsible for the search on an increasing number of sites. But there is no-one that has the dominance that Google has with web search. Over the next few years there will probably be a site search vendor who will serve more queries than Google. It will be interesting to see if they get anywhere near the attention.

What type of searching is more common: web search (using Google, Yahoo, et al) or searching within a site?

The number of web searches done daily is approximately 200 million. Google gets about half of those about 90 million. At SLI we serve site search for only a tiny fraction of all web sites but on some days we serve over 20 million site search queries. This indicates to me that there are significantly more site search than web search queries .

You can look at this another way - look at the most popular sites on the internet - a few of the top sites are search engines - Yahoo, Google, MSN - then you start getting into myspace, ebay, amazon, craigslist and youtube - a lot of people using those will be doing searches on those sites.

When you start looking down the list of top sites and you realize that almost all of these has a site search, it quickly becomes evident that site search must occur a lot more than web search. My guess is that there would be at least an order of magnitude more site searches done, .i.e. more than 2 billion/day!

Danny Sullivan announced that he was leaving search engine watch this week. The main reason was that Incisive Media, the owner weren’t letting him share in the wealth he was creating for them. This is a major blow for Incisive because, although Danny has built up a great team he is the soul of Search Engine Watch and the Search Engine Strategies conferences. It will be interesting to see how the site and conferences go without him. This will depend somewhat on what Danny does with any alternative conferences post SEW. SLI will definitely take a close look at participating in any conference he is involved with.

Recently I have been relying more and more on the daily searchcast to keep up with the search news. I’m pleased to hear Danny is going to continue doing the searchcast after he leaves.