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Isn't Google incredibly famous for their dedication to A/B testing?

A/B/N testing from what I heard. One of the examples I know of it that they split the users into about ten groups, and very slightly changed the blue hyperlink colour between them. They found that even a slight variation made a difference to the click-through rate.

I've had this same experience at work. I've complained about how ugly some features of our sites are on several occasions, only to learn that they are that way because the ugly (version/size/whatever) performed so much better than the others in our tests.

Other times the differences are subtle but increase the click-through rate by surprising amounts.

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