On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 3:41 PM, Taha Yasseri taha.yaseri@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Asaf, Back to your original question, Isn't "google rank" a user dependent parameter? I think depending on the history of clicks and other personalized preferences, how Google presents the results changes from user to user. So the term of "being first or second or ..." google hit sounds something symbolic and non measurable and generalizable to me.
Is it? That hasn't always been true, but I guess it is likely true today. So I guess generalizing from traffic-from-Google does make more sense... I wonder how much it varies for factual queries though, for instance if you are looking up something scientific or that isn't likely to be for sale. (we should run an informal test to see if people on this list get different results!)
Haitham: thanks for the info, though isn't 23% way way too low? I thought our rule of thumb was that 70-80% of the traffic comes from google searches. I'm not sure of the exact number offhand, but I would be very surprised if it was only 23%.
Anyway, I think my original question is a useful one lots of fields/applications, though my immediate interest is for the library literature, which has a habit of breaking down or differentiating "people who start their search with google" and "people who start their search with Wikipedia". I'd like to argue that this is essentially the same thing in many (most) cases, since so many google searches result in Wikipedia results front and center, and we know from lots of other work (SEO and HCI alike) that people rarely go beyond the first few results.
cheers, phoebe