User behavior
Posted by Ian Holsman
So a while back I bought a house.
One of the things which happened was that it was passed in and I was the only one who had made a bid. (In Australia, a. the housing market is still hot, b. the person who makes the highest bid as right of first refusal/negotiation rights with the seller).
I think I got a good price on the house, but mainly due to the other bidders (there were 2 other people keen on the house as well) being shut out of the auction. If they would have started bidding I believe the house would have gone for a lot more than I paid.
So how did this occur.
The auctioneer thought he would do what is right, and not what is common place. In Australia an auction usually consists of 3 phases. The starting phase where the auctioneer is usually bidding against himself and possibly one other, and the 2nd phase where the auctioneer goes back inside the property and then continues the auction and the third phase which consists of the auctioneer declaring the “house is on the market” which means the reserve has been met. Most people wait for the 2nd or 3rd phase to happen before they start bidding.
In our auction the auctioneer decided to do the right thing, and skip the 2nd phase. The problem is that the bidders were expecting him to do this, as such they didn’t start bidding, leaving us with the right of first refusal.
So why am I telling you this?
In the last 3-6 months I’ve been asked to review various startups who all claim they do a better search than google. and they start going into a demo where they type in a search and they do in fact produce a great result.
The problem is the way they type the search in. No one would ever type in a query phrase like they expect their users to do. Google has trained people to do search in a particular way. These companies expect they can re-train people to do search in their way.
I think thats a losing proposition from the get go.
Unless you are the leader in your area by a large margin, you should not and can not get people to change their behavior to suit your needs. Be it a “better” or more “correct” way of doing it. All you will end up with is confused users.
Interesting and true (plus you’re running Typo which I’m in the core team)
Interesting analogy! Google, in fact has become a verb and people have adapted to it’s style and even the “Search Result” presentation pattern. I was more curious to see little more detail on “What kind of query, were they using”. Here is something that I think will be useful to users and I am yet to see some one implement it. With recent launch of Google Search Mobile Application and also increasing usage of mobile searches (search done on mobile application devices), how about presenting to users “Similar Searches” around a topic or Personalized Search Results. So if I am using Mobile Device and used Google Mobile App to search on painter, present me the list of 5 painters in my area (You already know where I am located).