Slashdot Mirror
Google Testing a Radical Change By Turning People's Search Results Black (telegraph.co.uk)
Google may have plans to do a visual tweak to its search results. The company appears to be testing black search result links since the weekend, according to multiple reports. While some users are pleased with this tweak, many users have already posted their grievances on Google help forums. Some users note that it has become hard to tell which links they have already clicked. The Telegraph reports: Google puts a lot of thought into the exact colours it uses in its services -- and for a good reason. A few years ago its A/B test of different shades of blue -- nicknamed "50 shades of blue" -- earned the company an extra $200 million (£138 million). Designers at Google couldn't decide between two different blues, so they decided to test 41 shades between each blue to see which users preferred. In the test, Google showed each shade to one per cent of its users, and found that users were more likely to click on a slightly more purple shade.
How do we know it's a link if it's the same color as the text? The whole point of hypertext is that links are called out visually.
Each one had a sample size of 1% of their user base, which is probably a larger sample size than all human-research studies published in a given year combined. I'm betting that when you plot colors on an axis against user behavior, it makes a nice curve too.