Forum Moderators: mack
Therefore I would like to ask from MSN/Live (or what's it called?):
- Please fix the visual ergonomy of your search page.
Near the end of the 90s the Internet's buzz word was visual, since the Internet was preceived as a visual place by the gurus, then. Somewhere down the line people started to realized that, in spite of all the audio-visual temptations, people still want to read stuff. And so we swing back and forth between extremes, while the truth lies in the middle.
Any proficient webmaster will confirm that the visual layout of a page directly affects the way a user behaves on his page and how many conversions are made.
On a Live Search page the point of focus lies within the gray pronsored sites block, to the right of the text.
The blue of the links against the white background is toned down a bit from #0000FF to a lighter blue. The overall impression one gets from the page is one of paleness, uninviting and uncompelling. Please ignore me, it gently says.
Google's success is in part due to having chosen a bare bones layout. Equally uncompelling, but still locking the visitor in place, simply because there's nothing else there. The point of focus lies within center of the light-blue band near the top (which matches the Google logo in color) and the eye is naturally diverted from there to the search results.
Compare with Yahoo. The light-blue band does NOT match the Yahoo logo in color and the top of the page looks messy. The point of focus lies on the "Also try" line and from there the eye is bound to move up, rather than down.
I'm sure it's possible to approach the visual ergonomy of a webpage scientifically, but to capture a visitor will always be an art.
I have a dream.
I dream about some top rate graduates in computer science who want to get into search. Their startup will conduct an all-out marketing campaign and hire me for visuals. Their search results won't be as good as MSN/Google/Yahoo, but the avarage user doesn't notice anyway. Within 5 years they will hold 50% of the search market.
Happy New Year!
[edited by: Martin40 at 6:49 pm (utc) on Dec. 21, 2006]
The way they currently do this, and have for a while for both meta tags and robots.txt, is to list the page as URL only in the SERP. That is still indexed, it is after all.. in the index and easy to find.. why is this so hard for MSN to understand?
I don't care which they choose (robots or meta), just listen when we say not to index it! noindex, means don't put it in the index.
