Billions upon billions of web searches have been run via Google since at least some of us first encountered the minimalist page design that seemed to promise a no-frills experience of quickly and efficiently getting worthwhile results. The main entrance page to Google.com is still minimalist and focused on a single, basic function - getting our search term and returning results. I should note, however, that I only very rarely actually get to that first opening page (should it still be called the Google home page?). Instead, from whatever page I happen to be on I type my search terms directly into the address bar. What's more, even if we're on the main Google entrance page if we start typing into the search bar the position of the bar gets automatically moved to the top left-hand corner. (In Hebrew it seems that it stays in the center of the page.) Since I spend close to no time in front of the main Google page I'm hardly influenced by the minor but constant changes that take place in the display of that page. But Google seems to care a great deal, and runs many experiments to make sure we have a positive experience and that we'll want to return.
In a 2009 New York Times profile on Marissa Mayer (when she was still at Google) we learned a bit about those experiments:
She ends up giving the same or similar guidelines to managers for various Google features and products in other presentations that day. The guidelines are devised, she said, from myriad internal experiments to gauge users’ preferences. Avoid first- and second-person pronouns. Always write “Google” instead of “we.” If you want to make the design on the page simpler, take away one of these: a type of font, a color or an image. Don’t switch tenses. And steer clear of italics because they are hard to read on a computer screen.I admit that what we can learn from that, beside the fact that Mayer was a stickler for details and devoted to keeping things simple, is that "myriad internal experiments" had been run. But a passage a bit later in the profile gives a whole new depth of meaning to the word stickler:
A designer, Jamie Divine, had picked out a blue that everyone on his team liked. But a product manager tested a different color with users and found they were more likely to click on the toolbar if it was painted a greener shade.I have no idea whether I viewed any of those 41 gradations while they were being tested. I also like to think that minor differences in hue wouldn't influence my search experience such that I might not return to Google because I subconsciously felt that something was slightly off on the page. Clearly, however, Google experiments on us. Matt Cutts, head of Google's Webspam team, delivered a lecture at the 2012 Korea Webmaster conference. WebProNews reported on that lecture, and quoted a couple of sentences from it:
As trivial as color choices might seem, clicks are a key part of Google’s revenue stream, and anything that enhances clicks means more money. Mr. Divine’s team resisted the greener hue, so Ms. Mayer split the difference by choosing a shade halfway between those of the two camps.
Her decision was diplomatic, but it also amounted to relying on her gut rather than research. Since then, she said, she has asked her team to test the 41 gradations between the competing blues to see which ones consumers might prefer.
“So these are numbers from 2009, but the proportions, the rough percentages, are about the same,” says Cutts. “We would try out anywhere from 10,000 to 20,000 ideas. Of that, many more thousand, 8,549, we would send to these blind side-by-sides, and then a smaller fraction of that actually get sent out to real users and to see whether users tend to click on the newer results or tend to click on the older results. And the final number changes that we launched last year was 585.”Okay, that final figure is perhaps not really so massive - only a bit more than one and a half changes per day that have been brought about through experiments that examined what might cause us to more readily click. Still, even if we acknowledge how vast Google is, we can safely call that a rather large scale. And of course nobody asked us if we agree to be "experimented" upon. Be that as it may, I'm not sure there's any reason why we might have objected.