As many people know by now, AOL made a faux-pas last week by releasing millions of search data records. One piece of the data release was about the click patterns of users who completed searches. A user on the Earners Forum, breakpoint, ran the math about the clickthrough rates for positions 1-10.

We are taking it one step further by graphing this data. The chart really demonstrates the rapid leveling off after position #2.

Total Clicks: 4,926,623
Click Rank1: 2,075,765
Click Rank2: 586,100 = 3.5x less
Click Rank3: 418,643 = 4.9x less
Click Rank4: 298,532 = 6.9x less
Click Rank5: 242,169 = 8.5x less
Click Rank6: 199,541 = 10.4x less
Click Rank7: 168,080 = 12.3x less
Click Rank8: 148,489 = 14.0x less
Click Rank9: 140,356 = 14.8x less
Click Rank10: 147,551 = 14.1x less

If we thought position #1 was important before, now we have concrete data to substaniate the claims. What is interesting is positions #3-10 are basically in the same ballpark.

And, as we knew already, the first page is the place you want to be. Over 89% of the sample resulted in clicks on the first page of results meaning that just about 10% of clicks came from all other result pages.

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