What is it about?
This representative study of German search engine users (N=1,000) focuses on the ability of users to distinguish between organic results and advertisements on Google results pages. We combine questions about Google’s business with task-based studies in which users were asked to distinguish between ads and organic results in screenshots of results pages. We find that only a small percentage of users is able to reliably distinguish between ads and organic results, and that user knowledge of Google’s business model is very limited. We conclude that ads are insufficiently labelled as such, and that many users may click on ads assuming that they are selecting organic results.
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This page is a summary of: An empirical investigation on search engine ad disclosure, Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, October 2017, Wiley,
DOI: 10.1002/asi.23963.
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Resources
SearchStudies: Prof. Dr. Dirk Lewandowski
Prof. Dr. Dirk Lewandowski is a professor of information research and information retrieval at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He is the editor of Aslib Journal of Information Management (formerly: Aslib Proceedings), a ISI-ranked information science journal.
SearchStudies: Dipl.-Bibl. Friederike Hanisch
Dipl.-Bibl. Friederike Hanisch ist Doktorandin am Department Information der HAW Hamburg. Ihr Interesse an Suchmaschinen und Web Information Retrieval stammt aus einer vorangegangenen Tätigkeit als Wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiterin ebenfalls an der HAW.
SearchStudies: Sebastian Sünkler, M.A.
Sebastian Sünkler, M.A. is a research assistant and lecturer at the Department of Information at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences.
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