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Google Eye-Tracking

The site’s engineers are revealing a new line of eye-tracking studies that aim to see where your eyes first land on a Web page — then make sure the content you want is in that same place.

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The Google team has been watching people’s eyes for a while now, but this is the first time it’s sharing the results with us. What engineers have found makes enough sense: People scan pages like search results very quickly. Their decisions on what links to click are almost automatic.

Using that information, then, the Google gods have worked to build their pages so that you’ll see and click on all the right stuff. The following heatmap image, for example, shows how most people look at search result pages. The darker the pink gooey blob, the more time people spent focused on that part of the page.

Applying Eye-Tracking Principles {.articleBodyContentSubHed}

So what’s all this mumbo-jumbo really about? Here’s the deal: These eye-tracking principles can be applied to practically any page. Google uses them in everything from Google News — learning which areas of the screen are most apt to grab your attention and placing links, ads, almost anything accordingly — to Google Image Search, discovering whether the second row or the second column is most likely to catch your eye.

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