What Are YOU Looking At? Google Knows

Actually, is there anything left that Google doesn’t know?  They seem to know everything from where you’re located to your heart rate these days.

Now they know where you’re looking too.

Google now has a special program that tracks test participants’ eye movement as they scan search results for the perfect link.

All this really shows is that Google has confirmed that the first few results it returns are the ones most people look at first.  The heat map shows that peoples’ eyes generally go to the upper, left-hand portion of the screen first.

What’s really interesting, however, is the following video provided by Google that shows how quickly users glance around result pages.  You really only have a micro-second in which to make a good impression on a web surfer:

This is further evidenced by the hear map below, also from Google…

In the video, I didn’t even see any ads on the right-hand side.  The user’s eyes never even traveled to that side of the screen.  I wonder if it’s because there were no ads there, or if people have just gotten used to avoiding the ads.