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."
"This year more people used the internet than there are people."
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.
Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
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
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.
I once heard a study which claimed that the people who had the most accurate self-perception were depressed people. So does having an accurate perception of oneself make one depressed or vice versa? It made a lot of sense, though. The world sucks a lot of the time, and maybe the only way you can deal with it is to go through life thinking things are better than they really are.
Fortunately, I don't have to worry about that, because I have excellent internet skills, I'm a great driver, and I'm irresistable to the chicks.
thank god for Prozac!
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?
it's because we have excellent signal processors attached to our eyes, and are able to correct simple errors like that before it gets out of our language centers and into the rest of our brain.
Which is why I do proofreading backwards. It is much easier to to catch errors reading backwards:
backwards reading errors catch to to easier much is It
- - - - - - - - - - -
I am a programmer. I am paid to produce syntax not grammar. Deal with it.
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?
People don't pay that much attention to to what they are reading.
As well they shouldn't. People learn to filter out unimportant details, perceptions, and sensations, otherwise they'd go crazy. Nobody needs to be acutely aware 24/7 that their shoes are on their feet. I suppose competence/intelligence is partly a matter of how well you decide what to filter.
There are no "sponsored links that are displayed without colored backgrounds or physical separation from the search results." I never claimed as such in my original post.
There are, however, sponsored links that are displayed in the same color scheme as the ordinary search results. Because the sponsored links look so similar to the genuine search result links, they may be confusing to the consumer. The only indication that the links are "sponsored" is a line of grey text.
I believe that Google phased out the colored-background links for ordinary AdWords for two reasons: (1) to get advertisers to pay more for what they had been getting for free, and (2) because end users would easily confuse the similarly-colored sponsored links with general search results.
For more information, click here.
After discovering that Mozilla had added the ability to have style be limited to certain URLs I wanted more practice with CSS and fixing issues with web sites that bother me or make it difficult for me to read them. The first thing I fixed was the message display in the new Google Groups. I was annoyed that they had changed the display of message bodies from a monospaced font to a proportional font. I'm a shell script junkie so this change had made scripts and code snippets in Usenet postings hard to read. Google Groups has an algorithm to check each line to see if it should be monospaced or not but it usually makes things worse. So I coooked up this:After that was done I realized that the ads on the Google Groups search results overlapped the search results themselves. It problem doesn't help that I have an poor vision, even with glasses, and have to use a 20pt font just to be able to read things. The ads overlapping my search results were hindering me reading the information that I needed. So I removed those.
Wanting to work on something more challenging I decided to try and remove the ads from all of the Google sites that I use. Google doesn't use stylesheets everywhere so I had to learn more about CSS3 selectors and try to isolate the elements that contained the ads.
Anyway, I don't feel bad about this at all. The ads don't contribute to my online experience; In fact, they take away from it as they are just more information that I must scan with my eyes and process. Better to remove them altogether. Removing them also has the benefit that I have more of my screen real-estate back like with the Google Groups search results. At my font size, some web pages can get pretty cramped.
Last, and this might sound silly, but after living on the Eastern US for many years and then moving to the San Francisco bay area, I was surprised to notice that there are no billboards on the sides of the roads, save for some large cities like San Francisco itself. This made me have a new appreciation for an ad-free environment. It's so nice to be able to see and enjoy the beautiful scenery around here without having that view interrupted by someone trying to sell me something. Since then I've noticed that I'm advertised to constantly. I receive junk mail in my regular mailbox, spam in my email boxes, telemarketing calls, ads on the radio, ads on the TV, ads that I can't skip before movies on DVDs that I bought, ads in the theatre before I watch a movie, ads in magazines, ads in newspapers, etc. It's relentless and overwhelming.
At least I can do something about it. I use spamassassin and milter-sender on my mail server. I put my address on the DMA no-mail list. I put my address on the list to not allow credit checks by credit card companies. I put my phone number on the do-not-call list. And if I can weed out the ads on web sites then I'll do that too. I use the same policy with web ads as I do spam. My browser, my rules. Just because it's on your page doesn't mean you can dictate how or what part of it is shown to me.
Meanwhile, I'm having a blast with style sheets and the URL limiting in Mozilla. It's really enriched my browsing experience.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
Actually, having worked quite a bit as a computer instructor teaching adults to use the web, I can say that this has absolutely been true in my experience. I constantly have to point out the difference between ads, even really obvious ones, and search results.
I think the problem is that the average person does not understand or think about the economic relationships of websites, eg the fact that ads help pay for free websites. Most of the time they have no idea who is providing a website or why - they just think "the computer" gives it to them.