Comments on: On Invisible Tabs (and Hands) http://battellemedia.com/archives/2003/12/on_invisible_tabs_and_hands.php?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=on_invisible_tabs_and_hands Thoughts on the intersection of search, media, technology, and more. Thu, 23 May 2013 12:55:00 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.4.1 By: Jamie Lawrence http://battellemedia.com/archives/2003/12/on_invisible_tabs_and_hands.php#comment-25238 Jamie Lawrence Sun, 28 Dec 2003 22:52:48 +0000 http://battellemedia.com/archives/2003/12/on_invisible_tabs_and_hands.php#comment-25238 <p>My partners and I were just talking about this, in a slightly different context. It is hard to decide when to attempt to intuit intent from a user in code, and when it goes wrong, it goes really, very wrong (think Clippy). Some people don't like the idea as a matter of policy, which I think is wrong-headed. </p> <p>I also think people become really enthused about the whole thing and it easily becomes annoying. Google - so far - seems to be striking the right balance, which is extremely impressive. </p> <p>I think the real value of such measures can only be derived by live testing - out of the 400K people who did that +"George Bush" search, how many hit the "web" button thereafter, how many added a search term and re-searched, etc.</p> <p>As a side note, I've noticed that once in a great while, I get an exit redirect out of Google (meaning the URL returned for a search points to a Google server and they issue a 302 redirect to the desired location) - I've verified the statusbar flicker by searching my browser history, and the cached version of the page. I have only seen it twice, but they do appear to be doing some sort of statistical exit sampling. Has anyone else seen this?</p> My partners and I were just talking about this, in a slightly different context. It is hard to decide when to attempt to intuit intent from a user in code, and when it goes wrong, it goes really, very wrong (think Clippy). Some people don’t like the idea as a matter of policy, which I think is wrong-headed.

I also think people become really enthused about the whole thing and it easily becomes annoying. Google – so far – seems to be striking the right balance, which is extremely impressive.

I think the real value of such measures can only be derived by live testing – out of the 400K people who did that +”George Bush” search, how many hit the “web” button thereafter, how many added a search term and re-searched, etc.

As a side note, I’ve noticed that once in a great while, I get an exit redirect out of Google (meaning the URL returned for a search points to a Google server and they issue a 302 redirect to the desired location) – I’ve verified the statusbar flicker by searching my browser history, and the cached version of the page. I have only seen it twice, but they do appear to be doing some sort of statistical exit sampling. Has anyone else seen this?

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