Are you feeling lucky?

In all the confusion, did I study this stat or not?

[Brett_Tabke]

How many more referrals do you experience from position 1 to position 2, and do you think that's based on 'being lucky'?

[BigDave]

I can only give this as a sample of one SERP, but I had a single listing at #1 that went to an indented listing at #2 & #3. Having the indented listing more than tripled my referrals.

This example doesn't really answer your question, but it makes me think that "I Feel Lucky" doesn't account for that many searches.

This was a 2 word search that only brings a few hundred referrals a month, so I don't know how applicale it is to the more popular searches. But it was the only on that I could think of that even remotely applied to the question.

[nyehouse]

i recall from SES Boston 2 years ago that someone (I think it was Overture) worked out that the first spot gets 50% more then the 2nd spots and over double the third spot.

Surprisingly, spot #10 (if 10 per page) gets more than position #4. Something to do with being the last link before the next button, and the way humans read pages.

There is a whole science behind this that I suspect the PPC people have pretty good numbers for.

[Brett_Tabke]

Ya, in a traditional se, I can agree with those figures. Just looking for any weird wild stuff happening because they were 'lucky'.

I kinda maintain that the 'lucky' factor is pretty slim because so many people are not coming into serps via the home page, and even fewer of them feel 'lucky'.

[ciml]

Only about 4% of my Google referals have 'navclient' in the 'REFERER' variable.

IE5 seems to send "http://www.google.com/" when I click the lucky button, so for a good test we need to include only browsers that send the redirecting URL.

I have only 3 matching hits from the last fortnight (I don't know if they always send the redirecting 'referer'):

MSIE 5.0 on Mac_PowerPC
MSIE 5.14 on Mac_PowerPC
"NCBrowser/2.35; ANTFresco/2.17" on RISC OS-NC 5.13