Search Engine Optimization and Search Engine Marketing - How Tony Bennett Inspired a User Experience Experiment

Nov 13 2007

How Tony Bennett Inspired a User Experience Experiment

Wednesday, 14 November 2007

With all the "advice" we've been receiving from search engines on how to manage our sites and provide the right user experience, I was thrilled to happen upon a little experiment. I recently created for myself the opportunity to do some user experience testing on the various search engines. I was surprised by the result and surprised by the advanced universal search experience on some engines while others really lagged behind.

When my wife called a few months ago and said she had just gotten us tickets to the big concert in late October, I could hardly believe my ears. I would soon be going to see one of my favorite bands, Van Halen, perform live. Then she uttered these words, "I've always wanted to see Tony Bennett in concert!"

Wait! What!? Tony Bennett? Is he still alive?

Well, yes he is and my wife was set on going. And you know what, the concert was excellent. I'm also a fan of 1920s jazz and his music takes you right back to that era. In fact, throughout the performance I started to think of Tony Bennett as an icon. Imagining all the generations of music his voice has endured, I wanted to learn more about the person so the next day I plopped down in front of my computer, opened up Google and searched for "Tony Bennett". Here is what I was greeted with:

This was a bit of a letdown. Maybe my expectations were too high, but with all the talk of Universal Search I was expecting a very rich media-type experience with music, video, news, and more. A link to more music results seemed to be all that was offered along with related searches at the bottom of page one. Well, that wasn't enough for me so I headed on over to Yahoo.

Now, this is a much improved user experience over Google. From the nice results box featuring Tony Bennett, I'm able to listen to music clips right there, watch video clips (right on the SERP!), get a link to the official Tony Bennett site or click on links to check out albums, photos and more. I really felt like I had access to everything I needed right from the top of the SERP. But, realizing this is good experiment material, I headed over to MSN to see what they had for me.

MSN's results were more in line with Google's. They did offer a Top Albums section that indicated there were reviews, but it still didn't top Yahoo. They did offer related searches above the fold and above the sponsored links which I thought was a nice user experience touch. So, remembering back to SES San Jose and all the talk about the revamped Ask.com, I thought that would be a good final destination for my experiment.

Ask.com lived up to my expectation based on the good showing they had at SES San Jose. Their top box result had a short bio with links to a full biography, songs, and more. A short scroll down on the right side of the screen yielded images, music clips, video clips and even an encyclopedia result. I'm not sure I'll need to know anything more about Tony Bennett after the Ask.com experience.

In my opinion Yahoo and Ask definitely gave me the most relevant and rich results. Granted, I was looking for a rich media Universal Search experience, but I'd be curious as to how many people searching on musical artists wouldn't be. MSN came in a distant third and Google a very distant fourth. Is this indicative of all searches? Absolutely not. But, I was surprised to be that happy with Yahoo and surprised to see how far some search engines need to go in providing a better user experience.

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