An analysis of searchers' perceptions of sponsored and non‐sponsored links using nested design

Abstract

This paper examines the effects of sponsored links' reputation. We pursued this study through a mature design of experiment method -the nested design -in order to investigate this fast growing segment of online advertising. In this study, we firstly analyze the adaptability of the nested design to find out whether the reputation of sponsored links will bias searchers. We then carefully contrived a user study to investigate this phenomenon. We used 56 participants engaged in six ecommerce Web searching tasks. The tasks were extracted from the transaction log of a Web search engine so that they could represent actual ecommerce searching information needs. We controlled the study by switching non-sponsored and sponsored links on half of the tasks for each participant. By doing this, we could use the nested design statistical method to detect the impact of the sponsored links' reputation on the final evaluations of these results. During the study, we collected 2,435 interactions with links from search engine results page and 961 utterance evaluations of these links. The results indicate that the reputation or the location of the sponsored links will show strong significance on the final evaluation of the search engine performance. We give some perspectives and discussion which could benefit search engine providers to improve their services. IntroductionWeb-based commercial information systems are widely accepted and recognized as challenging to develop.Among the various types of approaches to Web-based information system, Web search engines have been regarded as an important area due to performance and capabilities. Generally, Web search engines often present at least two categories of search results on the results page. One set is composed of non-sponsored links that the search engine determines using its proprietary matching algorithm. The other set is composed of sponsored links that appear because a company, organization, or individual purchased the keywords that the searcher used in the search query (Jansen, 2006). Sponsored search brings the major search engine companies, such as Google, MSN Live, Yahoo! and AOL lots of revenue, reportedly in the billions of dollars (see Bloomberg.com, http://www.bloomberg.com/). However, the key to whether sponsored search is a viable business model comes from the rate of perceived relevance by the users. To maximize the number of searchers coming to the search engine, the search engine companies have to take specific actions to attract visitors to your site from search sites. This is called search engine marketing. However, users have questioned the relevance of the sponsored links because of their advertising characteristics. Therefore, it is a trade off for the search engine companies in terms of the revenue and customers.In responding to this dilemma for the search engine companies, this paper reports the results of a carefully designed research study that investigates the interaction between the searchers and the sponsored links. Few studies focus on the reputation of th...