In the early days at Google, company executives would occasionally receive an email addressed to their ‘comments’ inbox. The text in these emails consisted only of a two digit number. It took a while to work out, but they eventually realised that these emails were only sent when the word count on the Google homepage increased, as a warning it was getting too cluttered.
The moral of the story, and one of the reasons for Google’s success is its simplicity. Users found it easy to understand; in other words Google has good usability.
How else does search and usability match up? Pretty well in fact; Google takes active steps to try to direct users to useful and usable content. Web spam is bad for usability and bad for search. The guidelines for search copywriting are virtually the same for clear, understandable and user-friendly writing.
Indeed, with the advent of the Google Quality score in paid advertising, how long before there are usability and engagement metrics in search engine algorithms?
