In the still nascent tablet market, research is ongoing about how consumers interact with this new computing medium. Whether it is how users interact with tablet magazines or how much time they spend using various apps, there is still a lot to learn.
Advertising network Chitika released a study today showing that when perusing Google search results, users are more likely to scroll past the first couple of results than they are from a PC. The study showed that 20% of iPad users click the top search result in Google, a decline from the 34% who do so from a personal computer.
The study was done using data from the Chitika ad network that serves three billion monthly ad impressions on the Web across 100,000 sites. The company compared it against a similar study they did last year for Google position results from desktop computers.
“It appears from the data that iPad users are more willing to scroll to find the answers to their queries, and even go to multiple pages,” Chitika wrote in the study. “Perhaps this can be attributed to the touchscreen interface, or the fact that search behavior isn’t yet ingrained in tablet users like it is in desktop and laptop users.”
Chitika said that it is not certain if this is true across all tablet or touch screen devices or whether it is just an “iPad phenomenon” and has promised to study mobile gadgets
Chitika is active in studying analytics of web trends. In August, 2010 it was one of the first to report that Bing had overtaken Yahoo in search market share and did a study shortly after the first iPad was released on where the early adopters call home. The company spends a lot of time studying on search trends, which would make sense for an ad network that wants to know where the eyeballs are going to be.
