Eye tracking research could make Bing an advertiser's sweetheart

I think the last line is most telling. The reason why \(I believe) people don't look at the sponsored results on Google searches is because they know that they are essentially adverts. As people aren't used to Bing yet, they're not so familiar as to what are 'real' results and what has been paid for. If Bing does take off \(and that's by no means guaranteed), I wouldn't be surprised to see these results change to match Google more closely.

another PR noise to attract people to User Centric, not Bing a sample of 21 users - it sounds even not funny to me

Bing's essentially new to users, so of course they're eyes are going to linger longer on any area. Until, that is, they've fathomed out which are the paid links. Conduct the research again in a year's time, and then see what the results are. If I had a spare tenner, I'd wager it that there would be little or no difference. Like Mirek says, a bit of PR noise to attract visitors. Just like me saying my survey of 1 says Portsmouth FC are the greatest club in the world...

Common sense really, on bing the ads are much closer to the natural listings. In my opinion this has long been an issue for Yahoo whose ads are even further removed from the other listings. I believe it to be one of the reasons that clickthrough rates tend to be lower on Yahoo than Google. Good call Bing. Not sure whether we can draw too many conclusions from a sample of 21 though!!??

It's always a difficult call to run stories on this type of research. The sample size is small but most of these types of studies, where a company gets people into a lab to test website usability, are small. When there are more people involved as these guys say there will be or someone comes up with a more comprehensive study then we'll update and make a bigger deal about it.

The sample size collected had sufficient power to detect a significant difference. The type of study performed is a common practice in virtually all forms of research practiced in all behavioral science graduate programs in the world \(defending dissertations and the like). As you will find, User Centric consultants frequently publish papers in peer reviewed journals and publications, as well as present data at professional associations domestic and international. We believe that we run our studies in a sound and rigorous manner that is in line with the scientific method. That said, we acknowledge some may argue about the sample size. Yes, we could have run more participants, but that only increases power. Would 30 have been better? 40? 100? While sample size is really a question of power, a majority believe sample size comes down to "this smells large enough". But, the problem is that this assumes that the speaker says that these results or scores can be generalized to the population. This is not a question of confidence intervals, but a question of difference. Bing and Google's scores were significantly different. This is an inferential statistics question whether we can infer from the data that the difference is significant. If we were to run the study 20 times what is the likelihood that we could have found this difference by chance alone \(p value of .05). User Centric did not say that the scores were generalizable, but that the difference between Bing and Google were significant. We are able to make that statement and yes, sample size played a role in the statistical analysis performed. Now, we certainly welcome discussions on new research questions or even if we think the result is due to the novelty of the Bing design and whether this will fade away. Valid points where we could run a study with experienced users and other permutations. Please forward topics for research questions to me directly. The result is what it is. Let's talk about the implications, habituation, usefulness of features, whether the options were copied from Google and improved or made worse.