

Ask HN: Any ideas as to why Google changed search result margins? - tewks

We know that their design choices are largely data driven:<p>http://stopdesign.com/archive/2009/03/20/goodbye-google.html<p>Any thoughts?
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minsight
Since we don't have access to our data, and since it took them a very long
time to do this, I'd guess that the reasons are more subtle than we could
practically guess. It probably increases their profitability per page by some
tiny fraction, which is big money with their volume.

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robin_reala
Well thought out gutters can make a big difference to the readability of a
page, but that generally is only a big factor when it comes to pages with lots
of data crammed into multiple columns; not something you’d assume would be a
problem on a Google results page. My best guess is that (like the
aforementioned shades-of-blue incident) they did a whole bunch of user testing
that suggested that the usability and probably profitability of the page went
up by a couple of percent with that precise amount of extra margin.

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jmonegro
I have no idea. If they don't change it soon I'm moving over to bing for
keeps.

