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."

Comments

Re:only 2200?

[Anarchos]

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.

Re:How could anyone be confused?

[generic-man]

Really? All the cheap AdWords ads (say, on a search for "linux") are in the exact same color scheme as the non-sponsored links.

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. ...nah, that'd be evil and Google can't be evil.

Re:It takes so little to be above average,,,

[Eric Giguere]

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.

Eric
Why Vioxx is like Prozac for lawyers

What ads?

[Matt Perry]

Be confused no more. Add this to your userContent.css file. Anyone have entries for other search engines that use text ads?

/* Remove ads from Google search results */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://www.google.com/) {
table[width="25%"][align="right"][bgColor="#ffffff "] {
display: none ! important
}
}

/* Remove ads from Froogle */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://froogle.google.com/) {
td[valign="top"][width="20%"][align="right"] > table {
display: none ! important
}
}

/* Remove ads from Gmail */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://gmail.google.com/gmail) {
#rh table[class="metatable"] {
display: none !important;
}
#rh div[class="c"] {
display: none !important;
}
}

/* Remove ads from Google Groups */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://groups-beta.google.com/) {
/* Remove ads from Google Groups message detail view */
table[id="rn"] {
display: none ! important
}
/* Remove ads from Google Groups search results */
table[width="200"][align="right"] {
display: none ! important
}
}

Re:Because

[Cookie3]

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.