Recently we gave our results page a facelift. One of the ways we’ve made the page cleaner is to simplify – we’ve removed the source URL string from the results page.

In the past we thought it was a good idea to display it. At the time it made complete sense: it helps the user decide the relevance of the result; A video from ‘youtube.com’ may seem to be more attractive than one from ‘zooblr.com’. Many of the big players (Google, Yahoo!, etc.) display the source URL on their result pages. But the interaction within Taptu is very different - click a result in Taptu and you’ll be whizzed to a mobile-friendly Taptu Summary page. Do the same in Google Mobile and you’ll go to a transcoded source site.

People have established perceptions of how a search engine should work. When a URL is displayed beside a link, first-time users perceive it to directly link to the external site – in the old version of Taptu at least, the user’s expectation would differ to the actual behaviour.

So for now at least we’re experimenting by removing the URL. What do you think – should we continue to display it? Did you find it useful?

This entry was posted on Friday, April 25th, 2008 at 10:57 am and is filed under Design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.