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Larry Becker

Fast Pages, Tested to Perfection: Marissa Mayer at Google I/O

Title: Fast Pages, Tested to Perfection: Marissa Mayer at Google I/O
URL: http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/06/03/marissa-mayer-google-developers-conference/
Printed: February 9, 2010
Source: The Rimm-Kaufman Group Blog, info@rimmkaufman.com

Over at Search Engine Land, a quick post from Barry Schwartz, highlights a few takeways from Marissa Mayer’s speech at last week’s Google I/O Conference.

If you’ve ever wondered how Google decides questions ranging from how many results to serve on a page, to the amount of whitespace with which to pad the logo and the most effective color with which to tint the sponsored link box at the top of the page, the answer, not surprisingly, is A/B split testing.

Among the points Barry found most interesting are these 3:

* The more search results per page, the less people search
The reason? Less search results mean faster returned results.
* 30 results per page would result in 20% less searches when compared to 10 results per page.
* Google cut the bloat out of Google Maps and noticed a 30% increase in usage

The implication is clear: When it comes to Website Effectiveness, your site’s speed matters, a lot.

You’ll find more nuggets Mayer shared about Google’s design process in the News.com article: We’re all guinea pigs in Google’s search experiment.

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