Slashdot Mirror
Survey Says Internet Users Confuse Search Results, Ads
irishdaze writes "ABC News is reporting that
apparently only 18% of adult web searchers can tell the difference between
actual search results and advertisements. In addition to this astounding conclusion, the Pew Internet and American Life Project's
survey
of 2,200 adults (only 1,399 of which are actual internet users, mind you) also
indicates that 92% of web searchers feel they are confident in their own
searching abilities."
Google puts the search results in colored boxes, and the ads are all in black and white.
It may also have to do with the fact that when these adults are surfing the pron, they dont really care what's an ad or a website, so long as it has boobs
~/.sig: No such file or directory
92% of web searchers
Dude, relax. They are saying they interviewed 2200 adults. A certain percentage of those reported they were web searchers (probably somewhere near that 1399 number you quoted). Then, of that number, 90% of THEM feel confident in their own searching abilities.
In other words, nothing to see here, move along. Still, it's more fun to blame Pew than your own analytical skills.
And the growing amount of users with spyware, odd, I wonder why people complain about spyware so much?
Geeze could it be because they actually dont know the difference?
Wouldn't "92% of web searchers" imply that it's a percentage of the fraction of the 2200 that search the web, and not a percentage of the entire sample?
--- Tao
<Homer>Woo hoo! Finally above average! Take that Marilyn vos Savant!</Homer>
92% of web searchers feel they are confident in their own searching abilities.
Other useful stats:
38% believe Prince Magumbe Obada of Nigeria has $14,000,000 to share with them
56% believe that penis pills really work.
29% believe they have just updated their PayPal or bank account safely and securely
91% believe all that harddrive activity and bandwidth usage is Microsoft Windows ensuring their computer is safe and secure
44% believe the moon is still made of green cheese and the landings were staged in a warehouse in El Segundo
76% believe everything they read on the internet, which doesn't challenge their moral values, is true, the rest is all crap
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Without control there is caos and confusion.
that sounds like a very small chunk of adults to perform such a study on.
don't take GMAT, you will fail miserably if you can't see whose percentage they are talking about ...
"There is no flag large enough to cover the shame of killing innocent people."--Howard Zinn
As a maths student I love it when people can read what something says and then analyse the data.
This is easy to do in Altavista. Go there and do a search on "ads". After few times of this confusion, I basically stopped using them entirely.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
People are dumb, individuals are smart.
For example, re-read this post. Carefully.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
92% of web searchers != 92% of the surveyed adults
Sad that you actually had to explain that. Depressing that this is the sort of thing that makes it onto the front page. I feel like I'm watching one of those shittacular closed-circuit news shows produced by high schoolers, for highschoolers.
--LordPixie
I keep hearing it quoted that 80% of people think they're above-average drivers, too. People who are complete idiots never seem to realise how bad they are at things.
"This year more people used the internet than there are people."
"When I do the math, 92% of 2200 is 2024. This means that Pew/Internet is saying that more people are confident with their web searching skills than actually use the Internet. Saying that something is wrong here just doesn't cover it."
The article says "92% of web searchers" not 92% of the respondents. Only 1399 respondents used the internet, and it is possible that some of those don't do web searches. The submitter of this article is an idiot.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
People are dumb! This isn't exactly news, and we shouldn't be exactly suprised when people continually do dumb things. In fact, we prove ourselves as being dumb by expecting it.
...that same 18% are the only ones who can drive well, who didn't vote for Bush, and who wouldn't sue McDonalds for making them fat. Also, strangely enough, 37.8% of all statistics are made up.
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
The survey said 92% of web searchers. Not 92% of the survey population.
SteveM
OK, time for the submitter to RTFA. From page 1 of the report:
92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching abilities
That's not people who don't use the internet saying they know how to search it well.
you can afford a colour monitor. the rest of us see all black-and-white on google. Not everyone can afford a colour monitor, Mr "I have Color Screen and my Keyboard has a Shift Key: Nyaaa!".
Apparently Google's clear spelling out of "Sponsored Links" is not clear enough for some id10+s...
"92% of web searchers"
92% of 1,399 is 1287
and to think i was doing a search for todays seo optimization and the google api stuff and ended up at this article! those bots are fast! http://www.epicurean.com/
I've been googling since dogpile/dejanews sold the groups to google, and I consider myself very competent.
Seems as if I can find anything I want for Linux, Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Calculus, etc., but I can't find a decent Vice City hidden packages map for the life of me.
I have to wonder how many people have spyware on their computer that sets their web search home to xupiter(which seems to be down at the moment) or other such "search engines". If you use those things, all your results ARE ads, so I really cannot blame the people who got confused.
Monstar L
Given such a win for the seller and the SEC, there will be little motivation to fix this problem of confusion.
...are confident in their comprehension ability, even though this number exceeds the number who say they read the underlying article.
Are these the same mental Midgets that did the exit polling after the presidantal elections?? They seem to have the same basic problem with the idea that the population cannot be > 100%.
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
The Pew Internet and American Life Project's survey of 2,200 adults (only 1,399 of which are actual internet users, mind you) also indicates that 92% of web searchers feel they are confident in their own searching abilities. When I do the math... Pew/Internet is saying that more people are confident with their web searching skills than actually use the Internet.
"Web searchers" is a subset of internet users. Thus presumably starting with even fewer than 1,399.
So close and yet so far from the world's perfect ID number
What do you expect from an organization that did a telephone survey to determine the effectiveness of telephone surveys?
The best part was that they determined afterwards that most people answer their phones, don't screen survey calls, etc. Do they live in some kind of alternate reality?
That said, I see several reasons for the results- a)people not understanding the questions (such as responding to "have you used the internet" as if it was actually "do you have internet access at home"...people do this all the time) b)lying to fit in ("Oh sure, I have the Intraweb! Yeah, I know how to use it!"), or c)lying just to fuck with the results (like we used to do in high school with the anonymous drug surveys. "PCP?" "Oh no, I prefer cocaine, that PCP stuff will fuck you up." "You're both full of it, I like Speed"...is a sample of the lunchtime conversation on survey-day).
Please help metamoderate.
In other news, 80% of the population consider themselves "above average" drivers.
I also heard that 70% of the sample has trouble with fractions and percentages! Can you believe that? That's gotta be almost half of them.
He will tell you that you need to stop looking at porn.
But it becomes progressively harder to inform people as the percentage of people you wish to inform rises.
At some point you have to draw the line and let people fend for themselves.
But this brings up another point:
If only 1/6 of internet searchers can distinguish between paid advertisments and legitimate results, what does this say about phishing?
This suggests that most people can't figure out the easy-to-spot phishing scams, let alone the sophisticated scams that many phishers have begun creating.
"But only 38 percent of Web searchers even know of the distinction, and of those, not even half 47 percent say they can always tell which are paid. That comes out to only 18 percent of all Web searchers knowing when a link is paid."
Obviously they are being very liberal with the numbers here. And just because the respondents said they don't always know the difference doesn't imply that they never know the difference.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"92% of web searchers"
The way that is phrased would indicate to me that it was 92% of those surveyed that identified themselves as web users.
I find laziness to be an excellent motivator.
The cynic in me bubbles to the surface again on this one. Search engine ads are deliberatly made to appear similar to legitimate results. That way, the advertiser has a better chance of getting a hit. I don't think it was that long ago that ads based on search showed up on the right-hand side of the browser window instaed of at the top of the search result list. By placing the ads at the top of the result list, both the advertiser and the search engine co. benefit. More clicks == more $$ for both.
"Ooo, this result is in bold and a different color. It must be most relevant or something."
I don't have a problem with this kind of advertising. I'll only complain if ad results aren't indicated at all.
I report to Colonel 2.6.1 and General Chaos is his boss.
More interesting is the fact that search engines can't tell the difference between commercial sites and informative sites. When I search for something I rarely want to hear the manufacturers spiel on that product, I want real first person accounts. Search engines seem to have no idea of the difference between a review and and advertisement. It can't be that hard. Search for a hard drive review. 90% of the search results have the exact same text (all stores which are selling the product), very few results come bac that objectively review the product. The sites that do objectively review the product don't say the exact same thing that the manufacturer says. hello Google?
"brxref
That 28.6% of adults don't use the internet, they use the eentarweb.
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
92% of the people who search on the internet, maybe?
The AACS key is NOT 0xF606EEFD628B1CA427BEA93A9CA9773F
Altavista is much more accurate, but they pollute their results with ad pages made to look like real hits.
Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
I've noticed alot of my students have problems distinguishing the ads from results on download.com. It takes a good bit of extra instruction to get them to understand the difference.
Required reading for internet skeptics
Do surveys ever reveal anything else?
Most adults also believe that diet aids sold on TV can really give you six-pack abs, that most rich people won the lottery, and that buying a certain perfume/cologne will get you hooked up with hotties of the opposite sex.
The finding shows that 44% of web searchers (ahem) use only one search engine. That's amazing in and of itself and probably brings tears of joy to the current market leaders (read: Google). It looks like it's going to take some more intense search engine advertising (a la Yahoo!'s old TV campaign) to get people to consider trying something new.
are made up, approximatly
Maybe they're blind from *ahem* certain activities, and their loss of vision prevents them from distinguishing ads from results.
Any1 other AOLer hear bout this?!! message me if you know!
k THX BYE
An Indian-American Hindu committed to non-violent thought/speech/action alarmed by the global explosion of radical Islam
I advertise my consulting business using Adwords, and many of my clients have no idea that they clicked on a paid advertisement to get to me. I know this because I always ask how they found me. I've even had several inquire how I got my website ranked so highly on google... when I tell them that it's not, that they clicked on a paid ad, they often tell me I'm wrong! I had a client last week that *insisted* my site was in the free results, which I know is not the case for the keywords she claimed she used.
Of course, I'm not complaining...
-R
I would hazard a guess that "actual internet users" means people who have an internet connection at home. Which would imply that the people outside of the 1,399 aer probably people who access the internet in a public area (cafe, library, town hall, etc..) or at their relative's home. So... no, I wouldn't guess that there is something wrong with the results. Simply something wrong with the way the report was written.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
51% of those surveyed actually believe George W. Bush was the best choice for the job.
Have you tried, say, searching for "doo-hickey REVIEW." Might be more likely to actually get you a review.
It was either then or the Gore voters in Florida, who were too dumb to realize "if you vote for Pat Buchanan, Pat Buchanan gets your vote".
Are you suggesting that, totally unlike Slashdot, people who have absolutely ZERO real knowledge about a subject might confidently assert their Sk1LLz?
Inconceivable!
Maybe Google is evil?
The point of the post was to draw attention to ABC's shoddy reporting about a survey that had too small a sample of respondents to be of any value. There was, after all, a disclaimer in the post about something not being right. Get a grip, folks!
That 82% of Americans are seriously dumb In other news, 86% of Americans believe that Ron Popeil infomercials are actually talk shows with extremely interested audiences.
From the article: 84% of internet users have used search engines. On any given day, 56% of those online use search engines. 92% of those who use search engines say they are confident about their searching abilities, with over half of them, 52%, saying they're "very confident". Which should have been obvious even from the abstract. 'Web Searchers' != 'All survey respondents'.
and statistics. :P
only 18% of adult web searchers can tell the difference between actual search results and advertisements.
I suspect what the survey actually shows is that only 18% routinely distinguish between search results and ads. The way this is worded, though, implies that if you pulled up a search and asked them to point out which are adverts and which are real results, they would be unable to do so. Come on, 82% of people aren't so illiterate they can't understand "sponsored links" when they appear on a web page.
Nor has he ever posted a single comment to /. C'mon Michael we deserve better than this.
After all, someone must be clicking on all those damn ads that pay for click-throughs. If they weren't the stupid things wouldn't be there anymore. Now I can rest assured that the stupid ads will always be there because most people don't even know they are ads and will click them...
nuf said
Yikes. I probably wouldn't post anything else for a long while submitter - the wolves are definately out tonight!
You are reading this the wrong way, this survey is not about internet searching abilities and confidence, it's about general arrogance and overconfidence. Which means 625 out of 2024 people (almost 31%) are typical pompous I-have-never-held-a-gun-but-I-am-confident-I-am-a- great-gunslinger type of Americans that everyone loves to hate.
What is the point of surveying those who don't use internet, if you are surveying "search on the internet"??
How is that noise going to contribute towards the final analysis?
They get what they deserve.
I mean, I don't consider myself all that super intelligent, esp. compared to some of the programmers/developers/sysadmins on places like slashdot. I know a guy who has a CS degree from Caltech, and just looking at the classes you need to pass to graduate makes me run in fear. But compared to the typical man on the street, I'm a fucking genius.
The idea of a big nanny state knowing what's best for the little people and making all the decisions for them... almost makes me agree.
As a thug, I love it when maths students act like pompous little know-it-alls. It justifies the severe beatings.
Sometimes it seems like even Google's wonderful AdWords program is fragile...especially it's business model.
As soon everyone figures out Google's text ads, *are* ads, Web advertising will get kicked down another notch.
Text ad blindness can't follow too far behind banner blindness, can it?
We used to run a google ad words when people searched for shell accounts or shell access and so on.
One day, we got a request from some lady in Florida. When I called her to give her the password, she was REALLY confused. I told her I was calling to give her the password and she said "I haven't even received the card yet". I said "Card? You don't mean like a shell gas station card do you?". "Yeah", she replied.
She had gone through our entire signup form and given her credit card information without even realizing that she wasn't on shell.com or something related to Shell Oil Company.
Unbelievable!
I think this comes up not infrequently in polls. Leading up to the US election I saw two polls with seemingly contradictory results, stuff like
- 60% think the situation in Iraq has made terrorism worse,
- 58% think Bush is doing a good job on terrorism
Dear mods.
This answer is the opposite of the reality. This is called sarcasm, and is sometimes used to achieve a 'Funny' effect, but not usually to be 'informative'.
and Carlin is dumber than most. A tinfoil helmet nutjob, he was babbling about his paranoid "who is really in control" theories on public radio recently. Unfortunately, this was a candid from-the-heart interview, not a comedy monologue.
Meanwhile, most people don't know the difference between their address bar and ${search_engine}'s search field.
Common sense is not so common.
Isn't it more of a reflection on our society? I wouldn't say that it is the search engines fault. (Except misdirected links to squating serach engines for hit money) I think that the average internet user can tell the diference. I also think that the average internet user in a hurry will bypass logical thinking and any anylitical skills in order to quickly find a result. I would like to see what affect the tab browsing capabilities of Firefox has had on searching the internet. Does the ability to quickly open a bunch of websites in background tabs increase the amount of sites recieving hits from misdirected search results...?
Hmmm... Technology... anyone have a match?
This survey surveyed only residents of the USA, right ? so they can't really say "Internet Useres" when they only questioned users from one country. Last time I checked, the Internet was this kind of global network thingy that people from all over the world could use. The survey results should say: 80% of Americans are dumb. well - gee, its a HUGE surprise, I never would have guessed! thanks for letting us know. Now can we please get on with our peaceful lives, outside of the US of A, where people actually have a clue..
It is intersting to note in the report that men are better and more frequent searchers then women. Is it because men have more practice...
88% of men who are internet users have used search engines.
79% of women who are internet users have used search engines.
40% of online men search at least daily, with 28% searching several times a day.
27% of women search at least daily, with 16% searching several times a day.
54% of online men say they are very confident in their search abilities. 40% of women say they are very confident in their search abilities.
43% of men have heard of the distinction between paid and unpaid results. 32% of women have heard of the distinction between paid and unpaid results.
From the article: "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." The thing is, I've read that many websites hire consultants to try to increase their ranking in the "free" results, rather than paying google or whomever directly. So the distinction is a bit vauge anyway.
Are these 82% of "web searchers from a limited polling" then a bunch of idiots, or are they just by-products of our consumer-oriented marketeering?
Would anyone out there venture to say that "82%" of those people searching might be doing so to support some need to buy something anyway? After all, the whole intent of search engines is to find information -- I wouldn't believe anyone that told me more than "18%" of web-searchers are searching for mere educational/enlightenment purposes(no pr0n doesn't count here).
and now back to the fallout shelter...
I advertise my consulting business using Adwords, and many of my clients have no idea that they clicked on a paid advertisement to get to me. I know this because I always ask how they found me. I've even had several inquire how I got my website ranked so highly on google... when I tell them that it's not, that they clicked on a paid ad, they often tell me I'm wrong! I had a client last week that *insisted* my site was in the free results, which I know is not the case for the keywords she claimed she used.
Why is this a problem? People search for information and they get links about companies which provide products and/or services which may help them. They may also get general inforamtion in the free results. Now, ideally, the ads should be worded such to make them clearly commerce-related, and they are different enough that someone who knows the difference can spot them. But from a user's perspective, what's the difference? Iether way, they are finding what they are looking for (hopefully).
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Only 18% of the American public is actually intelligent.
Try eMusic. DRM free, legal, MP3 downloads.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
This reminds me of studies that show something like 85% of drivers think they are above average in terms of safety and skill. Humans are masters of this sort of self-delusion, but mostly it comes out of shear ignorance. Intelligent slashdot-worthy people are a tiny minority of the people using the web. That's a good, good thing: it keeps the rest of us employed. This is something to celebrate, especially if you run a web site that uses AdSense.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This is a very good turn of affairs. People too illiterate to distinguish between raw results and ads are a marketer's dream, and their unwitting business subsidizes the whole system. While the rest of us can usually distinguish the two, and so avoid the ads. As long as 82% are so easily fooled, the ad biz won't spend the time and money to blur the distinction any more, fooling more of us. Just like innumerate state lottery players subsidize education budgets. In the kingdom of the couch potato, the remote-carrying man is king.
--
make install -not war
OK, probably redundant, in the "they're dumb, Jim" department, but I wonder how many people notice the difference between an article in a magazine, and something on a page marked "SPECIAL ADVERTISING SECTION"?
On the other hand, I'm not sure there's usually much difference, anyway
my dad, mom, in-laws, aunts, uncles and every boss I have ever had. These results surprise NO ONE!
"Results may contain ads."
"Do not eat search results."
"Search results may not be used for personal hygiene."
Even self-proclaimed 'expert' users sometimes amaze me with their search results. One SysAdmin I know had an idea for a product that he was going to build with a friend of his. He drew me pictures, gave an outline of expected profits. He said that he'd done quite a bit of searching on the Net and couldn't find any competition. I thought that was odd and sat at his terminal and within a few minutes, found nine companies selling almost exactly the product he'd described on both sides of the Atlantic, from basic to luxury with a wide range of prices. He promptly gave up the idea. (Perhaps I should have charged consultancy?)
Did he inhale?
If you knew you were only surveying internet users, you'd have a more biased set of data, and wouldn't get some of the other results they listed.
Survey Says Internet Users Confuse Shit, Shinola
Survey Says Internet Users Confuse Ass, Hole in the Ground
Survey Says Internet Users Unaware Bears Shit in Woods
Survey Says Internet Users Unable to Find Own Head with Both Hands, Flashlight
Survey Says Internet Users Approximately as Smart as Submarine Screen Door, Rubber Crutch, Solar-Powered Flashlight
All I get then is "buy doohickey at dealtime.com" type sites. :)
The survey says: 55% of searchers say about half the information they search for is important to them and half is trivial. 28% of searchers say most of the information they search for is important to them. 17% of searchers say most of the information they search for is trivial. But which category do they think pron searches fall into?
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
how come crap like this goes to frontpage while my submit of paris_hilton_2.mpg is rejected the third time...
Simple question. Why block these ads? Are you offended by the very idea of advertising? They've created the least annoying and most relevant form of advertising the web has seen. If you can accept any advertising at all, surely this is it.
I block ads that are annoying and/or misleading[1], but leave the rest alone. I guess if you find it difficult to distinguish between an ad and an actual search result then you might feel that these are misleading ads, but I've never had this problem with Google (or maybe I'm in the 82% that don't know the difference).
[1] Actually, I usually block advertisers that use these tactics. Blocking individual ads is too time-consuming and not effective enough.
About 1/2 of the population has below average
intelligence.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
But then i relized that this was an american survey. Lets face it, their not the sharpest tools in the box.
Are these people questioned the sames ones who buy Herbal Viagra from spam email?
...All I can say is that my life is pretty strange...
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Before when people needed to look up information Like a company or service they would look in the Yellow Pages, These yellow pages have Adds mixed in with the other entries (which are still adds but they paid more for the big ones). Now searching the Internet you see these adds as well. Most people probably realized that a companies paid good or whoever to make these adds stick out but what they don't realize that the adds may not be in the order of best match searched. So if the add has what you looking for then they click it, if there is stuff on it they want they use the site if not then the go down the list.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
You may be correctly confident of your search abilities despite being unable to pick out the ads. Searching is finding what you want, if the ads happen to contain what you want, your search was successful, and your confidence in your search abilities was not misplaced.
"Who is the Journal of Quantum Physics going to believe?" --Stephen Hawking
And in other news, 82% of adult web searchers are goddamn morons.
Yes, my only tool is a hammer. And you're starting to look like a nail.
Research found that 92% of newspaper editors can not tell the difference between a scientific study and a cleverly disguised add.
In the Pew article there is a link to /pdfs/Search Module of MayJune04 Tracking Topline.pdf but it doesn't exist. The closest I could find was PIP_Data_Memo_Searchengines.pdf, which has some questions, but nothing about sponsored links.
for we are the 18%
A blog I run for the wealth
So 18% of people who answered the phone and didn't hang up can't tell the difference. Go figure.
postmodernsideshow.com
Pew research says "Whoever smelt it, dealt it."
49% of them voted for Bush too! You can probably discount those as people who barely know how not to drool on themselves.
:-)
But the Bible told them, "Thall Shalt Drool"
Table-ized A.I.
Only 18% can tell the difference between an ad and a non-ad???
They must have interviewed all the slashdot editors...
For one thing, most people have a very hard time talking about the elements of computer interfaces. As someone who works on web interface development for clients, time and time again people will look at a comp, then when discussing the comp from memory will miss vital aspects of the comp or have a difficult time describing which elements of the comp they want altered and why.
This is a case where observed use would provide much better insight into how people interact with paid search ads. It's like the difference between focus group recommendations and usability testing results. Almost always there are differences between what people say they want when you're talking about it on the phone and what they actually want when they're sitting in front of a computer.
Also, I find it annoying that they didn't break the results out by engine. Not all paid advertising is set aside in the same fashion, and my guess is that results would vary by engine. The Pew folks likely have their reasons for keeping the results aggregated, but it also makes the information less valuable, because it doesn't reveal what specific aspects of advertiser identification work and which don't.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
If the ads are relevant to you information search, why should they not be considered search results. Google gives you ads that it thinks you're interested in based on your search criteria, so in a way they are search results. Often the ads seem more relevant to my searches then the actual search results.
OKay, I thought of such grass-roots blogger manipulations as Google's miserable failure (try it) search going to President Bush that went around to everyone, yet people trust search engine results?
But then, Whatever-God-There-Is help me, I RTFA.
Most people can't tell that the results in the box labeled "sponsored results" are paid-for ADVERTISEMENTS???
Quoting TFA:
Google Inc. marks such ads as "sponsored links," Yahoo Inc. terms them "sponsor results" and Microsoft Corp.'s MSN 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.
But only 38 percent of Web searchers even know of the distinction, and of those, not even half 47 percent say they can always tell which are paid. That comes out to only 18 percent of all Web searchers knowing when a link is paid.
Who was it, P.T. Barnum who said something like "Never underestimate the stupidity of the public" (I know, he's also attributed with "There's a sucker born every minute")?
This is enough to make me lose a lot of hope in the future. I never thought people were THIS stupid. Pardon my while I invest in sponsored search engine links. When the world ends I might as well have money.
This doesn't even go into result manipulations making sites appearing more popular with sandbox submissions and such. But that's way too subtle a point for this article.
Tag lost or not installed.
In other news, 18% of adult web searchers are idiots.
Or use Adblock
Evolution is just a scientific theory. Creationism is not.
Well that makes adsense
Kind of sad to think of the person who sees the seizure-like flashing ad "ARE YOU STUPID" (no joke) and thinks it's a search result.
"That's the fscking point!"
UTF-8: There and Back Again
Something clearly got lost in summarization here. Besides the mysterious "half 47 percent", the first sentence claims that a certain percentage of respondents "say they can always tell...", and the second draws the conclusion that this means that group are the only ones who can tell paid from unpaid ads.
It could just as well be that the other group of web searchers can tell the difference just fine, but aren't secure about it or aren't willing to say "always," or perhaps they don't trust that the search engines are labeling things accurately.
It could also be that the ones who say they're always able to tell are dead wrong.
I think it would be much more interesting to know how people did in practice, rather than what they reported over the phone.
Check your paws guys (yes, I know women read /. too, but this one is a study on males). This study correlates depression with the relative length of the ring finger to your height. It then correlates this to prenatal testosterone, prenatal testosterone to more growth of the right hemisphere of the brain (at the expense of the left), and therefore to some aspects of intelligence (susceptability to autism, etc).
Interesting stuff.
You are checking your backups, aren't you?
I think you're being a little optimistic about how much control most people have over their emotions.
Hey, that's US dude!
No big surprise.
The goal of advertisers is specifically not to get accidental clicks, atleast when, as with adwords, the clicks are based on a cost per click (cpc) model as opposed to a cost per impression (cpi or cpm) one. There is no benifit to the advertisor to pay for a click that will not convert, and as I breifly touch on below natural results (or confused searchers) do not convert as well as paid ones.
Adwords blurs the line to some extent, because they figure the click through rate into the cost per click - ads which are clicked more often pay less for each click, but in the long run as an advertiser you still pay more overall.
In any case I question the statistics given (and particularly so with google users) because those site I run that are positioned well via both advertising and natural results often demonstrate the advertising to convert far more effectively (as measured by metrics such as page views per visitor). Generally natural results bring bulk crap traffic while paid ones intice lower volume but higher quality visitors.
How do I keep track of people who are fingering
I live in the Bay Area too, and grew up 'back east', and AFAICT there's plenty of billboards out here.
those same survey subjects confused their asses and elbows.
hahahahah!!
Just say no to license servers!!