Some of you may have read one of my first YOUmoz posts about Bounce Rates. Although others have discussed and blogged about user statistics, I think it's important to revisit the issue. Google's search results have been dancing for awhile lately, largely in part to the ax coming down on paid links, but I strongly believe that other factors are at work.

A recent article I read fueled my obsession with user statistics such as bounce rates. TechnologyReview.com conducted an interview with Peter Norvig, a director of research at Google.  One specific part of the interview got my attention: 

"TR: You claim that Google's accuracy is pretty good. How do you know how good it is, and how do you make it better?

PN: We test it in lots of ways. At the grossest level, we track what users are clicking on. If they click on the number-one result, and then they're done, that probably means they got what they wanted. If they're scrolling down, page after page, and reformulating the query, then we know the results aren't what they wanted. Another way we do it is to randomly select specific queries and hire people to say how good our results are. These are just contractors that we hire who give their judgment. We train them on how to identify spam and other bad sites, and then we record their judgments and track against that. It's more of a gold standard because it's someone giving a real opinion, but of course, since there's a human in the loop, we can't afford to do as much of it. We also invite people into the labs, or sometimes we go into homes and observe them as they do searches. It provides insight into what people are having difficulty with."

Our firm has been conducting tests on bounce rates and other factors. Although I would admit that we do not have enough data to absolutely prove that Google is using bounce rates, length of visit, or depth of visit to determine search results, I believe we have enough data for me to believe that Google is doing just that.

How could Google track everyone's bounce rate? They can use Analytics and the Google toolbar. If Google had Google Analytics installed on Google, that's all they would need to track bounce rates or a similar statistic. If you did a Google search, left Google to visit one of the results, and then returned to the results page via the back button, that could be considered a bounce. 

I'm not saying I've proved anything, but I believe this is the trend.