Have you ever Googled something and couldn’t get the result you were looking for?
It happens sometimes.
I recently was searching for a very specific pair of men’s shoes, and although I came across a few sites that sold them, I couldn’t find anywhere that had them in stock.
I found myself going into the depths of Google SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages), all the way into results pages 10, 11, 12, and beyond.
But while obviously wasting far too much time searching for men’s shoes, it dawned on me how poor the Google search experience is from a usability perspective.
You need to click on a result, scan that page, then click back to the SERP page, then click on another result, scan that page, then click back to the SERP page…and on and on we go.
So for Google, a company that puts so much emphasis on user experience (in relevancy, keywords, PPC quality score, mobile-friendliness, and SEO), why is the search experience so behind the times? Especially for mobile and tablet users who prefer to “swipe”?
Alas, I do not know.
But I offer them this, my two pennies on what a better search and user experience should look like after you Google something…
My Suggestion for New Google SERP
- Especially with more people searching with mobile technology, Google’s SERPs need to be visually driven and accommodate “swiping” over “clicking”.
- A better user search experience should let you “see” the first result (as opposed to a title, link, meta data, etc.), as well as upcoming results.
- There’s no clicking back and forth each result and each page of results, it’s just swiping and scrolling which would allow you to view results of your search much, much faster.
- Google could still have Ads (that’s what still drives the majority of their revenue), but less emphasis would be placed on text ads, and more emphasis placed on the preview of the landing page.
So that’s my two pennies, what do you think?