The evolution of search engine result pages has certainly changed user behavior. The strict F pattern style we saw before is, quite frankly, no more. (At least in the contexts we researched). With the advent of rich text and ad placement, users find themselves exploring the entire results page to find what they're looking for. As we saw through Google, many users look at rich text before even considering the actual search results.

http://conversionxl.com/how-people-view-search-results 

There ain't ROOM for an f-pattern on a phone. That's what's driving the shift, imo.

You are a wise man RC

Interesting article!

I'm not too surprised that the F is gone now that there are images and etc. displaying on the right side, but what I thought was interesting is the difference between Google and Bing searchers.

Subjects looking at Bing SERPs seem to spend more time at the top of the page ie. in the ads, while they jump to the right (to the images) and down to the organic listings more quickly when looking at a Google SERP. I couldn't quite figure out whether subjects got to choose between Bing and Google - meaning that you'd be able to draw some conclusion about the type of person that tends to use Bing vs Google for search, or if they were just shown a SERP (which I think was the case) - which would mean that there is something about the way Bing's page is laid out that leads to the behavior.

I suppose it's also possible that Bing is just different enough that users are used to the Google interface so they skip to the "more trustworthy" organic listings. However, the Bing results were different enough that they couldn't make that automatic jump?