The need for speed 16 Nov 2006

John Battelle reports on Marissa Mayer's presentation at Web 2.0:

"[Mayer] shared insights into some lessons Google has learned in trying to serve users. The take-away is that Speed is just about the most important concern of users - more than the ability to get a longer list of results, and more valuable than highly interactive ajax features. And they didn't learn that from asking users, just the opposite. The ideal number of results on the first page was an area where self-reported user interests were at odds with their ultimate desires. Though they did want more results, they weren't willing to pay the price for the trade, the extra time in receiving and reviewing the data. In experiments, each run for about 8 weeks, results pages with 30 (rather than 10) results lowered search traffic (and proportionally ad revenues) by 20 percent."

Yet another example of why observing what users do is more important than listening to what they say.