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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.
<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
that sounds like a very small chunk of adults to perform such a study on.
For example, re-read this post. Carefully.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
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
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...
Given such a win for the seller and the SEC, there will be little motivation to fix this problem of confusion.
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.
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
Do surveys ever reveal anything else?
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.
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
Have you tried, say, searching for "doo-hickey REVIEW." Might be more likely to actually get you a review.
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?
I'd say I'm quite the power user (hey, I'm posting here on /., aren't I?) and I deliberately *don't* differentiate between advertisements and search result pages when searching for tangible goods.
Why?
Oftentimes the "Sponsored Links" are more to-the-point with what I want to buy than searching out a vendor and clicking through their site.
You can't say that 80% of Americans are dumb. Give us SOME credit. Only 51% of American voters chose Bush! That makes use mostly dumb, not almost entirely dumb.
If someone says he and his monkey have nothing to hide, they almost certainly do.
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
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
"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?
Survey Says Internet Users Confuse Shit, Shinola
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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. :)
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
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.
If you use Google, then the ads are contributing to your online experience. If they weren't there, you wouldn't be able to use Google.
It's hard to be religious when certain people are never incinerated by bolts of lightning.