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

The survey is absolutely right

[RebornData]

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

Re:Why?

[Matt Perry]

Simple question. Why block these ads?

For a handful of reasons:

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:

/* Display messages on google groups in monospaced font */
@-moz-document url-prefix(http://groups-beta.google.com/) {
DIV[class=mbody] {
font-family: monospace ! important;
font-size: medium;
}
DIV[class=mbody] pre {
margin: 0 ! important;
font-size: medium;
}
/* 100% width for search results */
.r {
width: 100% !important
}
}

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.