How I love eyetracking studies. It gives you an insight on what users are actually looking at, if something which is so carefully positioned on a webpage actually works. I also love eyetracking studies which show how people look at search engines. Add in the paid search – organic debate and on top of that a battle between Google and Bing and I’m sold.

A recent eyetracking research performed by User Centric focussed on the differences between the two search engines. It was a follow up research from a study they performed right after the launch of Bing.

The study showed that even though there was not a lot of difference between the two, Google “won” slightly based on time spent looking at the results. Even though you can interpret that in different ways. It also showed that organic search still beats paid search by miles. Where everybody looks at the organic results paid search is being looked over in many of the searches. Only 28% of people searching on Google actually notices the paid results on the right… (more…)