According to some recent research over at Google HQ, web users like simplicity when searching the web. After conducting numerous tests on web surfers, which track the eye movements of the surfer on the search results page, the Google team have redesigned the advanced search page to make it more user-friendly.

Armed with this insight from field studies, we redesigned the page, simplifying it by removing terms that were unclear to the average user (the word “occurrences,” for example, just didn’t mean anything to many of the Advanced Search page users), moving rarely used features (numeric range searches, date searches, etc.) into a part of the page that was expandable with a single click. That made them easy to get to for people who knew they wanted to search with those restrictions, but out of the way in a non-threatening way.

One of the other things we noted in the field study was that people often didn’t understand how the Advanced Search page worked. So we added a “visible query builder” region at the top of the page. As you fill in the blanks, the box at the top of the page fills in with the query that you could type into Google. It was our way of making visible the effects of advanced search operators.

It just goes to show how much thought is put into even all aspects of web search. Im sure that by futhering this type of research, we will have a clearer idea of the “perfect website design” from a usability standpoint!

View the full Google report and Eye-tracking video here.