How do foreign search engines judge the quality of website user experience?

1) User experience is a complete process

On the eve of Google's listing in 2004, Mary Meeker, the Internet queen, visited China and passed Baidu. She said that colleagues of Morgan Stanley had just done a comparative evaluation of search engines, and the evaluation result was the best of Yahoo. But strangely, after the evaluation, everyone still uses Google. Later, Xu Yong, the co-founder of Baidu, helped me to get samples for their evaluation. I saw them at a glance, and it was like this:

They selected more than a dozen keywords, searched six or seven search engines such as Google/Yahoo, printed out all the search result pages and put them together for comparison. Each of them took a handful of coins and put a coin in whichever search result page they thought was better. Yahoo won in the end.

Why did Yahoo win? Because the background search engine Yahoo used at that time was also Google, but it had manually optimized some popular keywords, so Yahoo's search results were either the same as Google or better than Google.

Why do those financial elites use Google in their daily life and work after evaluation? Because this seemingly fair user experience evaluation is problematic, user experience is not only a simple comparison of search results pages.

For example, the printed pages on the desk are all what you see is what you get, but on the computer, if you want to see those search result pages, you need to pay an operation process: start from entering the domain name, download the Yahoo/Google home page that is more than ten times the size, move the mouse to locate in the Yahoo search box (Google automatically locates in the search box), enter keywords, Enter or click the search button to download the Yahoo/Google search results page several times larger. In the above operation process, the user's time cost and operation cost are different, especially when the average bandwidth is still small.

For example, the printed page on the desk can see the full picture at a glance, while the real user needs to browse the search results page in a computer screen. If users browse the Yahoo search results page at a lower resolution, they may only see one or two results after crossing the large Banner ads and loose design, while browsing the Google search results page, they can see more results. When the first search result does not meet the user's needs (which is very common), it is an obvious difference in user experience when there are more results on the first screen. I remember that Yahoo's search results pages with the same number of results were much longer than Google's, which increased user costs.

For example, when the search results on the first page do not meet the user's needs (which is also common), the user may/turn to the next page/click on relevant search terms/search for a new keyword/search engine/. Another common situation is that users need to use various vertical searches. Then, the page turning design, the size of the search box (Google was a little larger at that time), whether to place the search box at the bottom of the results page, the type and experience of vertical search, and other additional options seem to have nothing to do with the printed results page on the desk, but will "often" affect the user experience.

Therefore, although Yahoo's search results page relevance was always better than or equal to Google, its user experience was actually inferior to Google's. User experience is not a static page, but a process, which should be evaluated in combination with the actual use process of users.

2) User experience varies from person to person

The above is the result of the search engine market survey conducted by cnnic in 2006 on the "dynamic change of the number of users in half a year". Data accuracy does not need to be tangled. The key is to understand the pros and cons of "user acquisition rate" and "user churn rate" and the reasons behind them vary from person to person.

Google and Baidu, which are generally regarded as leading search engines, have the lowest user acquisition rate (although it has the influence of base size). Because that was the busiest time in China's search engine market after Baidu went public. Yahoo, Sohu and Sina were pushing their search engines, attracting enough users.

However, the user acquisition rate must subtract the user churn rate to be meaningful. In the above data, Yahoo, Sohu, Sina, Google's user churn rate is too high, and the result is that the user base has not increased.

When you are willing to spend money on marketing, it is the easiest thing to attract new users. If you tell them what you are good at, they will come. But it doesn't mean that they will always be your people. They will know and try other engines sooner or later. Some users will find out what is bad about you and leave, while some users will find out what is good about other engines and go for it. Of course, on the contrary, some users will also find out what is wrong with other engines and come back.

Behind the number of user acquisition rates, each user has different reasons for acquisition. Behind the figure of user churn rate, the reasons for each user's churn are different. The direction of acquisition and loss of all users is inconsistent, which is cross conducted among the five search engines. This is "user experience varies from person to person". In fact, each user's life and knowledge background are different, their definitions of search engines can be different, their search needs are different, and their feelings of user experience are also different.

For example, there will be users who can't leave Google because Google searches English materials easily, but there will also be users who abandon Google because they will find a lot of English pages in Google using English keywords, and switch to Baidu, which is optimized for this.

For example, some users will switch to Google because they dislike Baidu's bidding ranking, but some users will default to Baidu because hao123 is easy to use.

For example, there will be users who love to use Google's advanced search syntax, but there will also be users who love Baidu because they often download MP3.

For example, there will be users who choose Google because of its brand image, which is as tall as luxury goods, but there will also be users who choose Baidu because Baidu image search supports local browsing of the original image (Fast, which I learned), and they do not have to open one by one the rampant harassment and toxic websites at that time.

For example, skilled users will find that Google has a good search effect for compound words with spaces on Google and choose Google, but more users often use long keywords and questions to search, and Post Bar and Know How can often help.

For example, some users will like it because Google can search foreign English and Chinese news, But there will also be users who prefer Baidu's ability to search for news about emergencies of the day (Google first launched daily updates, but in the early days, Google came to grab Sina News and other websites in the middle of the night every day, so they could not search for emergencies of the day during the day, and I asked Baidu to grab updates every morning and evening after news editors' secret collections released news).

In short, user experience varies from person to person, and the company's capabilities also vary. Even though the user experience in some aspects is inferior to that of competitors, we can still develop strengths and avoid weaknesses, and change the user experience targeted at different user groups from more perspectives.

3) User experience changes with time





The first figure shows the growth trend of China's web pages, and the second figure shows the growth trend of China's Internet users. The time of the two charts is not the same, but we only look at the trend change.

Similar to foreign countries, the number and background of Internet users in China's early years (before 2000) were limited, and the number and type of web pages were also limited. At that time, the mainstream search demand was to find websites. So for big websites like Yahoo and Sohu, the user experience is good and they have gained most of the market share.

However, just three or four years later (2003), the number of Internet users has increased nearly tenfold (9 million to 80 million), and the number of web pages has increased a hundredfold (several million to several hundred million). Ten times of new users have a wide range of backgrounds and needs, and 100 times of new web content also provides the possibility to meet a wide range of needs. The search engine is just a middleman. When the upstream content and downstream users have changed greatly, and the mainstream demand has changed from looking for websites to web search, the user experience standard of the search engine has changed. This is the user experience changing from time to time.

Because the growth of the number of netizens and web pages is gradual every day, Yahoo people are like frogs boiling in warm water. Whether it is Yahoo abroad or Yahoo Sohu Sina in China, their default search results are always website searches, and they changed to web search very late. Before they changed, their user experience was actually declining every day, which was also changing from time to time.

Later, the number of netizens has increased nearly eight times (600 million), and the number of web pages has increased hundreds of times (150 billion). In this gradual process, the frequency of users' use of search engines is also growing rapidly. In the early days, Yahoo, Sohu, Sina and others positioned themselves as a comprehensive portal for everything. The search engine was just a vertical channel they owned. However, we know that each time users search in the comprehensive portal, they have to pay higher use costs. When users use the search engine more and more frequently, the cost of searching in the comprehensive portal will increase, The relative user experience of independent search engines is getting better and better. This is also the user experience that changes from time to time.

The early Internet can be understood as the interconnection of tens of thousands of servers. Users mainly obtain network content in a one-way way. The network infrastructure is also underdeveloped, and users need to "go online". However, with the growth of the number of Internet users, the popularity of broadband, and the outbreak of community products, users' online time has become longer, and more and more content has been fed back to the Internet by users. The definition of the Internet is also changing. Those connected personal computers and the users behind computers form the Internet together with servers. Products such as Post Bar Knows are to comply with the changes in the definition of the Internet, guide users to create a large number of colloquial discussions and Q&A, and meet users' needs for searching for obscure content, unexpected content, and questions. Conversely, when users' search experience in this area improves, they will form more habits of such searches. This is a process in which products and users adapt to and change each other. This is also a process in which user experience changes from time to time.

In the mobile era, the definition of the Internet has changed, people, things, services and information are interconnected together, and the user experience standards of search engines will change with time.