too_much_information - 1:48 pm on Mar 2, 2005 (gmt 0)

I don't know if this would apply to every page on the web. If you pay attention to the data you can see that the subjects are reading the entire first description, some of the second and just scanning after that.

It seems that they are making a judgement on the quality of the search by what appears in the first few spots. So if you are not in the top few spots your CTR is affected not by the fold, or your general position but by the quality of the descriptions above you.

It would be a great follow up to this study to see how many unique searches are performed for a give topic by each subject, how many listings are followed before each adjustment to the search, and the average position of the listings that were selected.