ResourceBlog Article: New Study: Consumers Learn Truth About Web Engines

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Monday, 30th June 2003

New Study: Consumers Learn Truth About Web Engines

Web Search
Source: Consumer Web Watch/Consumers Union
Full-Text Report, False Oracles: Consumer Reaction to Learning the Truth About How Search Engines Work
Here are the major findings of this study:
1. Most participants had little understanding of how search engines retrieve information from the Web or how they rank or prioritize links on a results page.

2. The majority of participants never clicked beyond the first page of search results as they had blind trust in search engines to present only the best or most accurate unbiased results on the first page. As a result, two-in-five links (or 41%) selected by our participants during the assigned search sessions were paid results.

3. Once enlightened about pay-for-placement, each participant expressed surprise about this search engine marketing practice. Some had negative, emotional reactions.

4. All participants said paid search links on search and navigation sites were often too difficult to recognize or find on many sites, and the disclosure information available was clearly written for the advertiser, not the consumer. Search engine sites that were perceived to be less transparent about these related disclosures lost credibility amongst this group of online consumers.
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A comment or two. Although the engines themselves have done a better job of labeling "paid" material, this report shows consumers need more. Perhaps this is an opportunity for the library community to do more in terms of education on how to best use "open web" search tools. This would also give us the opportunity to explain that we have the tools (databases, books) and the skills (most important) to offer the searcher material that is NOT accessible via any web engine in a very timely manner. More and more material is now being crawled but for many, as this report points out, it's only "visible" if it appears on the first page of results. Or, in info sci terms, the universe of material in the database is increasing without the proper tools to get the data out or by developing more sophisticated search strategies (increased recall/lowered precision)
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Also, while the second major finding is not a surprise (most people only look at the first results page) it is nevertheless alarming. One thing that might help is to increase the number of results reported on a results page. All engines allow you to customize the number of results returned (check the preferences page). By default, most engines return only 10 results. What's most interesting is not only do people look at a few results they're only searching with an average two search terms without the assistance of any controlled vocabulary.

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