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January 26, 2005

An interesting survey conducted by Excite indicated that only 1 in 6 users can tell the difference between an 'unbaised' free listing and a paid listing.

http://apnews.excite.com/article/20050124/D87QEK3O0.html
As much as the terminology doesn't bother me, although the thought that a paid listing could be considered biased instead of more relevant is pretty odd, it is interesting to see that users aren't aware of what they are click on.

This shocks me even further when research conducted on AdWords suggested that a third of visitors clicked on paid and 2/3 clicked on the organic. This would suggest 1 in 3 know the difference.

I personally see there being a number of reasons for this:

1) Google's listings are easier to distinguish between paid and organic

2) As a contrast, Paid Inclusion listings in Yahoo! are identical and paid listings are in a similar format

3) Maybe paid listings are considered more relevant on Google than on the other engines and as such more people click on then than in the other engines?

There could be a large number of reasons for this but it goes to show that as long as the user get's to their desired quarry then what difference does it make to them?

A question to all is, do the search engines want people to know or not and would people click differently if they did know?

J.

Posted by james at 01:48 PM | Comments (2367)