Surf*Mind*Musings

Reading books on the iPhone has been seriously competing with used bookstore paperback purchases for my scarce non-work non-family attention, largely with post-copyright (ex. harry harrison, poul anderson) and creative commons science fiction (ex. rudy rucker, cory doctorow), available from Feedbooks, consumed with Stanza.

I recently purchases William Gibson’s “Zero History” Kindle edition for the iPhone and read through a hundred pages, ocassionally encountering underlined sections but not giving them any attention. When a particularly Gibson zinger was highlighted, I tapped: “Some very considerable part of the gestural language of public places, that had once belonged to cigarettes, now belonged to phones.” … 56 other people highlighted this part of the book.

You can read this annotation, and copy paste as I did, from Amazon’s top highlighted page for this book. Suprisingly, this content is not available from the Zero History product page (book or kindle), as it seems to me to complimentary to, and more impartial and informative, than many reviews. These sections form the same kind of human smart summarization that link text (e.g. the text inside hyperlinks) provides for web search engines.

Trompsing through top highlights is rewarding for popular titles like Freaknonomics and “outliers: the story of success”. This use case looks to be specifically not supported by Amazon, so you’ll have to use precise query syntax, rendering results for short titles like “Blink” a mess — adding the author name to the query cleans the results up.

So how’s the book? Good, if a far cry from his intensely futuristic cyberpunk roots, with the iPhone playing such a critical role that when the MacBook in play was identified as an Air, it seemed like Apple should be paying for the product placement!

The latest TestPilot analysis shows the predominance of the back button in browser control usage, garnering 2/3 of clicks by user in the browser chrome. The observation that the back button is the most used browser control is longstanding, here’s a view from a ‘06 post excerpting the ACM WWW ‘06 best student paper from Weinrach, et al.:

Table 1: Comparison chart of three long-term studies

The replication of the finding is welcome, and the lack of novelty didn’t prevent Techmeme buzz from sprouting up, probably helped significantly by the excellent visual heatmap. Nice work Mozilla peeps! Here’s a zoom on the back button findings by clicks per user and % of users:

There’s been supposition that the growing use of tabbed browsing is reducing the importance of the back button. Certainly, opening search results into new tabs reduces the need to go back to get to search results as do parallel scenarios in non-search browsing. My recent analysis of tab usage from SRP and non-SRP pages shows that open in new tab is common but still a minority use case for search result browsing.

The TestPilot analysis doesn’t specifically address the relative prominence of back button versus tab switches or links inside pages because it only includes browser chrome — defined as the area surrounding the tabbed browser. I’d love to see a replication of this study which counted clicks on tabs as well as interior to the browsed page UI.

The latest Mozilla TestPilot study to publish data is the Tab Switch Study evolving the logging stream from the Tab Open Close study. Less robust tab usage data is also available in the first week in the life data drop.

In addition to improvements to logging to allow individual tabs to be tracked accurately as users open and close tabs around them, the latest study includes tagging of search result pages (SRPs). This is particularly interesting to me as clickstream patterns around search results are highly useful for evaluating search quality and even generating data for machine learning, but tabbed browsing (and new window strategies) may seriously affect how a server side log appears and complicate accurately reconstructing the user sequence.

How is tabbed browsing used in search?

I found that 96% of the users in the 2000 user data set had a URL loaded from an SRP. 86% of these users also opened a new tab from an SRP, suggesting that at least in this audience, opening links in tabs from an SRP is a very well known strategy available to over 90% of users.

The denominator for the following stats are *either* tab focus changes or page loads in a tab. For those SRPs, 40% of changes were page loads in the same tab and 20% were open in new tabs. Thus, open in new tab doesn’t seem to be the predominant strategy. However, I would expect navigational queries, estimated by research at 30% of web search engine usage, not to invoke a open in new tab strategy.

General behavior following a page load

Looking at successive events from a load event to specifically to understand search and tabs, we see users are only about 8.5% more likely to open a page following an SRP in a new tab than for any other page load.

My SQL for creating a MySQL table, importing the data, and creating a derived sequence table is available on github:

For my analysis of previous tab usage TestPilot datasets, see this post and my visualization galllery.

Back to tracking SRP behavior, it looks like tabbed browsing is only barely more of an issue for pathing in search behavior than in general web activity. Anybody know of an analytics solution that tackles this? Creative use of window.name would likely maintain pathing integrity even when tabs are opened in the background.