Chinese Eye-tracking Heat Maps - Google vs Baidu

[tedster]

Gord Hotchkiss over at SearchEngineLand began commenting on what could be a valuable Chinese eye-tracking study -- comparing user behavior on Google and Baidu. Many of the differences he uncovered are attributed to the fact that Chinese is presented as thousands of symbols, not a small alphabet -- and concepts take their final meaning from a combined group of symbols.

Here are a couple highlights that struck me as important:

...there doesn’t appear to be a Golden Triangle or an F Shape scan patterns in the Chinese example. While Google China’s heatmap has the typical upper left orientation hot spot, it doesn’t have the vertical scan down that creates the “leg” of the F. And horizontal scanning is much more spread out...

One other amazing comparison was the amount of time spent on the page before the first click. In our North American studies, we saw an average interaction with Google lasted about 8 to 10 seconds. In our study, an average interaction with Google.cn lasted about 30 seconds, and with Baidu over 55 seconds.

[searchengineland.com...]

The article is a pretty rich resource, and the full study should be published this week.

[bill]

That's a fascinating report tedster. Thanks for pointing it out. I'd suggest people interested in the Chinese market give that report some space in your bookmarks. That's the first time I've seen that sort of data for a Chinese SE. (And it's all in English.)