Paid placement strategies for internet search engines
Proceedings of the 11th international conference on World Wide Web
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
The Search: How Google and Its Rivals Rewrote the Rules of Business and Transformed Our Culture
How are we searching the world wide web?: a comparison of nine search engine transaction logs
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue: Formal methods for information retrieval
The effectiveness of web search engines for retrieving relevant ecommerce links
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Computer
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
Designing online auctions with past performance information
Decision Support Systems
The comparative effectiveness of sponsored and nonsponsored links for Web e-commerce queries
ACM Transactions on the Web (TWEB)
INFORMS Journal on Computing
Identification of factors predicting clickthrough in Web searching using neural network analysis
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Classifying and Characterizing Query Intent
ECIR '09 Proceedings of the 31th European Conference on IR Research on Advances in Information Retrieval
Estimating Ad Clickthrough Rate through Query Intent Analysis
WI-IAT '09 Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Joint Conference on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology - Volume 01
The good, the bad, and the random: an eye-tracking study of ad quality in web search
Proceedings of the 33rd international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Can visible cues in search results indicate vendors' reliability?
Decision Support Systems
How do framing strategies influence the user's choice of content on the Web?
Concurrency and Computation: Practice & Experience
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In this paper, we report results of an investigation into the factors influencing the selection of sponsored links by e-commerce Web searchers. In this research, 56 participants each engaged in six e-commerce Web searching tasks. We mined these tasks from the transaction log of a major Web search engine, so the tasks represent real e-commerce searching information needs. Using 60 organic and 30 sponsored Web links retrieved by submitting these queries to the Google search engine, we controlled the quality of the Web search engine listings by switching non-sponsored and sponsored links on half of the tasks for each participant. This approach allowed for both investigating the bias toward sponsored links while controlling for quality of content. Data included 2453 interactions with result page links, 961 utterances evaluating these links, and 102 results from a post-study survey. The results of the data analysis indicate that there is a statistically significant preference for non-sponsored links with searchers viewing these results first more than 82% of the time. Searchers view sponsored links primarily as advertisements, appreciate these links if they are relevant, and are unconcerned if the search engines disclose them as sponsored links. The implications for sponsored links as a long-term business model are discussed.