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Comment by crazygringo | Hacker News Reader

First of all, users are more sophisticated than you think. And why you're bringing nationalities into this, I have no idea. And obviously Google isn't going to be surfacing English content like Wirecutter in Spain -- it will surface well-known publications in Spain.

But secondly, even if you were right, it wouldn't matter. Users who click on the first link for everything don't change the relative clickthrough rates. The people who actively choose which links to click on would still be the ones influencing the ranking. Google is smart enough to control for clickthrough rates by their listing in results and knowing how far the user has scrolled.

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I've had the opportunity to analyze click behavior for some pages, and there's a huge bias for people to click things at the top.

Let's say for example 90% of users are unsophisticated and 10% are sophisticated. Even if the #2 link is preferred 100% of the time by sophisticated users, you're still going to see 90% of people clicking the first link.

But in your example, Google would almost immediately learn that sophisticated users click on the current #2 link, and then make that the #1 link for everyone. It's really easy to do statistically. The bias for the top link gets removed, that's always the first step.

Unsophisticated users are not negatively affecting the quality of results.

How exactly do you know that people are clicking on the #2 link because they are "sophisticated" and not because they simply prefer #2 for personal reasons?

I don't even understand your question. They're the same, by your own definition. You said unsophisticated people will just click the top link, and I'm assuming that means some of them will click the #2 link as well just because it's there -- since people often open the top n links. But if they're making a choice based on the link description, rather than just because it's there, then by your definition they're "sophisticated". They're clicking it for personal reasons, because they personally evaluated the quality of the link description.

I'm talking about "personal" reasons like you work for the company behind link #2 and not because #2 is actually better than #1.

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