The Evolution Of Google's Golden Triangle

In search marketing circles, most everyone has heard of Google’s Golden Triangle. It even has its own Wikipedia entry (which is more than I can say). The “Triangle” is rapidly coming up to its 10th birthday (it was March of 2005 when Didit and Enquiro --  now Mediative -- first released the study).

This year, Mediative conducted a new study to see if what we found a decade ago still continues to be true. (Check out this link for info on an online event Oct. 14 discussing the research.)




Why We Had a Golden Triangle in the First Place

To understand why the Golden Triangle appeared in the first place, you have to understand  how humans look for relevant information. For this, I’m borrowing heavily from Peter Pirolli and Stuart Card at PARC and their Information Foraging Theory (by the way, absolutely every online marketer, web designer and usability consultant should be intimately familiar with this theory).

Foraging for Information

Humans “forage” for information. In doing so, they are very judicious about how much effort they expend to find the available information. This is largely a subconscious activity, with our eyes rapidly scanning for cues of relevance.


The Area of Greatest Promise


F-Shaped Scanning

This was exactly the case when we did the first eye-tracking study in 2005. Google had set a table of available information, but it always put the best information in the upper left corner. We became conditioned to go directly to the Area of Greatest Promise. The triangle shape came about because of the conventions of how we read in the Western world. We read top to bottom, left to right. So, to pick up information scent, we would first scan down the beginning of each of the top four or five listings. If we saw something that seemed to be a good match, we would scan across the title of the listing. If it was still a good match, we would quickly scan the description and the URL. If Google was doing its job right, there would be more of this lateral scanning on the top listing than there would be on the subsequent listings. This F-shaped scanning strategy would naturally produce the Golden Triangle scanning pattern we saw.

Working Memory and Chunking


In search foraging, the dimension is relevance, and the inputs to the calculation will be quick judgments of information scent based on a split-second scan of the listing. This is a fairly complex assessment, so we found the number of options to be compared at once by the user tends to max out to about three or four listings.

This means that the user “chunks” the page into groupings of three or four listings, and determines if one of the listings is worthy of a click. If not, the user moves on to the next chunk.  We also see this in the heat map shown here:

Scanning activity drops dramatically after the first four listings. In our original study, we found that over 80% of first clicks on all the results pages tested came from the top four listings.  This is also likely why Google restricted the number of paid ads shown above organic to three at the most.


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