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Study author Dr Deborah Fallows said people trusted search engines as much as government agencies doctors and academics but were naive about sponsored web listings
People know little about how engines operate or about the financial tensions that play into how engines perform their searches she added
Only 18 per cent of searchers said they could tell the difference between sponsored and organic results
Tony Macklin from Ask Jeeves said paidfor results should be clearly marked as people need to be able to spot the difference...
Web users fail to identify paid-for search results
Many web users are still confused by the concept of search advertising with only one in six being able to tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements according to a new survey
The Pew Internet and American Life Project found that most adults who regularly used the web were an odd mix of sophisticated and nave when it came to using search engines
The report revealed that 87 of searchers usually find what they were looking for when using a search engine while 84 say they regularly use Google Ask Jeeves and Yahoo...
The Herald-Press
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work
The major search engines all return a mix of regular results based solely on relevance to the search terms entered and sponsored links for which a Web site had paid money to get displayed more prominently
Google Inc marks such ads as sponsored links Yahoo Inc terms them sponsor results and Microsoft Corps uses sponsored sites Such ads are placed to the right and on top of the regular search results in some cases highlighted in a different color...
Info, Promo, or Don't Know?
Is that an advertisement or a contextual link Does it even matter Those are a couple of interesting questions raised by a recent report from the Pew Internet and American Life Project
According to the survey results only 38 of Internet users were aware of the difference between paid and unpaid results while only one in six Internet users said they could tell the difference between a simple search result and a paid advertisement At the same time half of them said theyd stop using engines if they thought the search providers werent being clear enough in differentiating between the two
Talk about split personalities...
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By Anick Jesdanun Associated Press
Only one in six users of Internet search engines can tell the difference between unbiased search results and paid advertisements a new survey finds
The Pew Internet and American Life Project reported Sunday that adults online in the United States are generally naive when it comes to how search engines work
The major search engines all return a mix of regular results based solely on relevance to the search terms entered and sponsored links for which a Web site had paid money to get displayed more prominently...