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."
National surveys typically have 1500 participants, which will yield a respectable margin of error of about 3%. If you read the article, it states at the bottom that the 1399 internet users who responded gives a margin of error of 3%. It's rare to find a national survey will a smaller margin of error.
"A good conspiracy is an unprovable one." -Conspiracy Theory
"How could anyone be confused?"
These are the same people who don't read the words "legal document" on the top of an EULA before clicking through, who click "Yes" when some random page asks to be their homepage, and whose desktop is continually literally with spyware.
Have you tried, say, searching for "doo-hickey REVIEW." Might be more likely to actually get you a review.
Really? All the cheap AdWords ads (say, on a search for "linux") are in the exact same color scheme as the non-sponsored links.
...nah, that'd be evil and Google can't be evil.
Google used to put all the sponsored links against colored backgrounds, but they now reserve the special backgrounds for the larger and more expensive ads. Perhaps they want the consumer to believe that the sponsored links are very similar to the unsponsored ones.
For more information, click here.
people who had the most accurate self-perception were depressed people
Maybe you're thinking of this paper: Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Good reading. Not that it applies to me, or anything.
EricWhy Vioxx is like Prozac for lawyers
Actually, there was a follow up a few days later where it was discovered that simply reversing the order of the internal letters in the words would again render them difficult to read. Jsut thguoht I'd pniot taht out, bsuacee I fnoud it initseretng.
I ain't evil, I'm just good looking.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Some search engines are inserting paid results into the natural listings. I haven't found anyone that admits to it, but I know at least one major engine that is.
Google is not that engine. One of the services my company has started selling is Adwords consulting. Anyone can set up an Adwords campaign, but not everyone is savvy enough to understand how it works and run a successful keyword campaign. One of our clients definitely isn't savvy - so we're helping them do this. It's not a huge budget.
A friend of mine works for a company in Chicago that does this kind of thing on a much larger scale - millions of dollars in budget with major corporations. It's amazing how much work they put into tracking and reporting. It's not cheap.
This is a huge business for some folks, and while you can spend a lot on a website it means JACK SQUAT if you don't drive traffic and increase conversions.
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.
All I get then is "buy doohickey at dealtime.com" type sites. :)
Please mod the parent off-topic, overrated and/or uninsightful.
First of all, it's not a real research project at any real university. Secondly, the 'trick' to this appears to have more to do with numbers and powers than anything else:
The vast majority of English words are 4-6 letters long, in dictionary form. By subtracting the first and last letter, we're typically left with 2! (2), 3! (6) or 4! (24) possible word orders. Our brains simply search until a rough match is found.
Context may also provide a clue as to what the proper response should be.
Additionally, lengthier words tend to have predictable prefix/suffix morphology (pre-, astro-, dis-, -ed, -ing, -ally, etc). Because we are told that these patterns are correct, our brains tend to gravitate towards them when decyphering scrambled words.
It's trivial, BTW, to produce sentences that fool the brain into mixing up words -- sometimes providing results that don't end with the same letter or that aren't the same length.
present day... present time... hahahaha...
Actually, with all the comments about how stupid people are not to be able to tell the difference, I'd ahve to say that Google is skewing the Slashdot results.
I used MSN search at one point, and it took a moment to notice that the top few results were ads. They intentionally make it hard to tell apart, where Google intentionally seperates them out. I couldn't blame an MSN user for getting confused once in a while.