Recently ReadWriteWeb wrote an article on Facebook and its partnership with AOL. Facebook and AOL announced that they were going to integrate users Facebook friends into the AOL Instant Messenger. Nice to know, but the most ‘funny’ thing happened afterwards when ReadWriteWeb began receiving odd comments of Facebook users on their article:
Please give me back the old Facebook login this is crazy……………..(Nancy)
What have they done now. It’s not simple enough for me to figure out (Benny)
The new Facebook sucks> NOW LET ME IN (John)
What happened? The title of the article contained the words ‘facebook’ and ‘login’. This resulted in an higher page rank in Google’s search engine results. Users that queried ’facebook login’ in Google were confronted with a search engine result list in which the article of ReadWriteWeb was listed on one of the highest page rankings. Facebook users assumed that they’d landed on Facebook after hitting the first result, and were confused, angry and agitated when confronted with the ‘new’ Facebook design (read: website ReadWriteWeb). ReadWriteWeb tried to solve the problem by providing a link to Facebook and informing users that the site was not Facebook; they were only reporting on news about Facebook. But the measures they took didn’t keep Facebook users from commenting on the ‘new’ Facebook design (read: ReadWriteWeb). Which really sucked, according to Facebook users.
Users: often search oriented
Can we claim that these users are utterly ‘stupid’ and that they should be banned from the Internet? Definitely not! At our usability research company valsplat | usability reasearch we often see that users are becoming more search oriented. The Google search bar is used instinctively for search queries. This trend is also seen when testing websites or Web application; browse is less preferred when looking for specific content. Also, most search engine users we interview rarely look past the first ten hits. Preferably they hope to find what they were looking for in the first three hits.
There are even users that use the Google search bar to type an URL. It is more logical for them to use the Google search bar instead of the browser’s address bar. They expect that the first hit will lead them to right type of information. This explains why ReadWriteWeb was flooded by comments of Facebook users that expected to land on the Facebook homepage when hitting the first result on the search result page. So we are talking here about search at its best. Or worst…