Sunday, April 14, 2013

Five to Seven Search Results Per Page Please

Most web search engines return a minimum of ten search results. Following Miller's Law, I suggest the default number of search results be reduced from ten to seven for desktop screens and five for mobiles.

Google's web search has an "I'm Feeling Lucky" button to request just one result, but you can't change the default setting to less than 10 results. Miller's Law suggests people are comfortable with five to seven items. So I suggest reducing the default number of web pages displayed to seven for desktop display and five for mobile devices. The user should in addition be able to set the number of results to three,  five and seven, as well as ten, or more.

Apart from making it easier for people to read, fewer items would use fewer network and server resources.

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