Monday, July 6, 2009
Re: A Little Experiment
Last night I put up a small experiment. Thanks to the 1,939 people who voted! Now, I want to resolve what this was about, give a bit of background, and present the results.
The experiment showed an intro explanation and then proceeded by asking a brief question to which there were three answers. The question was “Which name would fit a movie star best?” and the answers were “Sammy Summers”, “Fred Ferentine”, and “Quayle Torton"*. But that was not what the experiment was about – I was merely looking to find a question and three answers to which there was no single “right” answer.
Furthermore, the three choices – which were preceded by the numbers “1”, “2” and “3” – were shuffled for everyone, so the order was random every time. This means that if people generally are more likely to click 1 (or 2, or 3) then no particular name choice would be in advantage.
So far, you might have noticed all these things if you participated. What you might not have noticed was that I presented not one, but two different intro texts preceding your choice, randomly rotating on every page load. The first text was the “unseeded” phrase:
“A question will follow – please choose quickly, following your intuition!”
However, the alternative – shown to roughly the other 50% of you – was this “seeded” version:
“A question with 3 choices will follow – please choose quickly, following your intuition!”
By now you can probably guess what the experiment aimed to find out: whether showing a big bold “3” in the beginning would, perhaps subconsciously, make you more likely to click choice #3 (or perhaps click it less, or trigger some other significant change).
Here are the results, and I’m highlighting where there should have been a difference if the “seeding” would have had the effect I wanted to test:
How the 1,939 clicks played out
the percentage shows the number of clicks, rounded, and relative to the overall amount of clicks for the seeded (or the non-seeded) group.**
As you can see, the difference in clicks for choice 3 between people who were shown the “normal” intro text, and those who were shown the “3”, is very narrow, and statistically insignificant I would argue (for many periods during the experiment, they were basically equal). In other words, people who saw the 3 in the beginning were not really more convinced to click the third choice. Also, the position of the choice in general didn’t introduce much of a bias either, apparently!
I’m interested what you have to say about the results. Here is a caveat I want to list: Absence of proof is not proof of absence! This means that the intro text might have made a difference which I did not measure – not saying this is likely, just saying this is possible. (Sometimes, the way you compartmentalize the groups participating can make a difference – say, hypothetically speaking it could be that all females are more likely to click on 1 and all males are more likely to click on 3 after seeing the seed sentence, thus canceling out each other when we only look at the mixed-gender results. That was just a random example to illustrate the point, I’m not suggesting this is in any way the case.)
Now, theoretically I’d love to repeat the experiment in different ways, using different intro sentences or measuring other differences and so on (speed of the click, for instance). Practically however, now that you know what this type of experiment is meant to check, it could destroy the results (and even if it wouldn’t, we could not be sure about it, so the results would be useless either way). Perhaps if you want to try a similar experiment but with changed parameters, you could do it at a different place where people are mostly not aware of this experiment.
*Among over 500 votes measured today, Sammy Summers was in the lead with 42%, followed by Quayle Torton with 30%, and Fred Ferentine with 26%. (But again, this was not what the experiment aimed to test, though it goes to show there was no clear-cut solution which basically everyone preferred.)
**Edit: instead of the integer value I changed to a better rounding, with a precision of 1 decimal digit.
On Google App Engine Downtimes
The Register’s Ted Dziuba wrote a rant about a recent Google App Engine’s downtime, and Google’s handling of it. (I can attest the App Engine is down more often than it would be healthy for a website which hopes to gain visitors... we had to experience this with our app, CaptionX, although Google’s service was free and Google additionally supported us with extra capacity.) Ted writes:
App Engine developers must go through the effort to contort their program to Google’s data storage mechanism, which in some cases can be a far cry from SQL. The benefit to this is that you don’t have to worry about scalability, ever. Allegedly. It’s sort of like how a heroin addiction means that you don’t have to worry about reality, ever.
As with anything that flies through a cloud, Google App Engine can suffer a double flame-out and crash to the ground, killing hundreds and swearing a large subset of the population off of air travel for quite some time. Google has paying customers for App Engine, and maybe Wonka doesn’t quite understand this, but when people pay you for a service, they expect a certain amount of transparency and honesty.
[Via Reddit.]
A Little Experiment
Sunday, July 5, 2009
Google Images Safe Search Switch Changed
Google image search made toggling the SafeSearch option a tiny bit easier, by including the settings switch menu right on the results page (instead of linking to the settings page, where one has to toggle a radio button option and hit a save button).* SafeSearch is Google’s adult content filter that can be turned off in most countries, though interestingly enough not in (at least) Google China.
*I believe this is rather new, but don’t know when exactly it was added.
Friday, July 3, 2009
Friendfeed’s Real-time Search
Now that ex-Google employees start-up Friendfeed has real-time search, you can feed their engine with a keyword like google and embed it elsewhere, like below (I could refine this search by restricting it to results which have X comments only, or have Likes, or which are only from my contacts at Friendfeed, and so on):
PS: If you want to subscribe to my links at Friendfeed, it’s there.
[Hat tip to Websonic!]
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Gmail With Drag & Drop
Drag and drop has come to Gmail: you can now drag a message by its left-hand grid, and move it into a label/ folder to the left side. Also, you can now re-arrange labels via drag & drop.
[Thanks Cookie Lee and Niranjan!]
Monday, June 29, 2009
A Changed Google Results Layout, Perhaps Experimental
I’m currently seeing a slightly changed layout for Google results. The Google logo has gotten smaller, and there’s more padding to the left. In Firefox, the file holding the logo for the new layout is called nav_logo6.png (when I open the old layout in Chrome, it’s nav_logo4.png).
This redesign could well be just an experimental prototype, and nothing that’s rolled out for everyone, I don’t know... who else is seeing the changed layout?
(Recently, the Google homepage also presented itself with less padding below the search box, but that may have been a temporary bug... it doesn’t show anymore to me.)
[Hat tip to WebSonic.nl and Tony!]
Friday, June 26, 2009
YouTube Changes Channel Layout, Gets 48,000+ Comments
A YouTube blog entry by a YouTube manager announcing the roll-out of a new channel design has so far received 48,668 comments, and growing. Looks like not everyone is happy (and it may or may not be that unhappy users are more vocal, too, right now). Included in the most recent comments right now are things like:
- “i think u should ask the viewers before u make your choice. please do that ... =]”
- “support this video against the mandatory changes - http://www.youtube.com/wat...”
- “Please allow the choice of both old and new channel designs.”
... as well as full blown ASCII protest art.
![[’Old Channel Rules’ written with @’s]](/files/old-channel-rules.png)
[Thanks Ionut and A.!]
Wednesday, June 24, 2009
HTC Hero, an Android-Based Phone (Video)
[Via Reddit.]
Tuesday, June 23, 2009
A Bigger AdSense Default Font
It’s only a small change to AdSense, but if you’re using Google’s ads on a lot of sites even small changes may make a difference: Google on Monday announced they’ve increased the default font size for AdSense units. However, since last week you can now also change the font size for AdSense ad units yourself. The font size dialog allows default, small, medium, and large. (The old default size equaled “small”, and the new one equals “medium”, Google says).
Google China Removes Auto-Suggest Following Gov’t Anti-Porn Initiative
Fingerpointing towards Google in a report by state-controlled CCTV; the user shows how he enters [xing], later stumbling upon scantily clad people in Google Images.
The search auto-completion feature on Google China’s homepage was recently removed. Why? Apparently, the Chinese government is on a mission to fight porn, and auto-suggestions might help people find adult sites. (A Chinese research mob – a “human flesh search engine” – found some problems with the govt’s tales, though.) Or were there other, more political problems with Google Suggest, of which we aren’t told? Via email here’s Google’s comment on the whole issue:
Google has been working to remove pornography from our search results in China, in accordance with our operating license there. This has been a major engineering effort, and we believe we have addressed many of the problems identified by the Government. As part of these efforts, we have also temporarily disabled the Google Suggest feature on Google.cn.
Google adds:
Finally, we have redesigned the home page of Google.cn to remove the radio buttons that offer language and locale options. These buttons were used by a very small percentage of our users. All other links on the home page of Google.cn remain unchanged.
Part of Google China’s auto-suggest feature was transliteration from Pinyin to Chinese characters, though, a feature that’s also gone now. However, there’s still Google’s nice IME (Input Method Editor) for that.
Monday, June 22, 2009
Experimental Google Product Boxes on Search Results?
Searching Google for tivo and dell inspiron, Steve Baldwin says he saw above Google image product boxes to the side. They’re gone for Steve now, he says, adding that he was probably “randomly chosen to see them.”
Whether these boxes are ads or just plain oneboxes in a special position, I can’t tell, thought from the looks of it they may well be unpaid. Steve remarks that the first link in the Dell box goes to Google Products, whereas the links below that go straight to the landing pages for “Express IT Options” and “Codemicro.com”, but that mirrors the results shown at Google Products, too.
Note Google Korea also features lots of graphic boxes to the right hand side of SERPs, and more graphical sides have also been sporadically seen on elsewhere.
[Thanks Steve!]
Google Adds Facebook Friends to Results
By Tony Ruscoe
I’m not sure how new this is, but when a Facebook user’s profile is returned in Google’s search results, you can now see the user’s location (or network) and a random selection of their friends, as shown on their public profile.
I’m not seeing any special markup in the Facebook profile page, but could this be Google’s “Rich Snippets” feature in action, as announced at this year’s Searchology conference?
[Thanks Luke!]
Question on Taking Photos in Public Spaces
If your country’s police were to drive around town with cam-equipped cars, automatically taking photos of all public spaces, would you mind? If so, why? If not, why not?
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