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

How could anyone be confused?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google puts the search results in colored boxes, and the ads are all in black and white.

Re:How could anyone be confused?

[Mistlefoot]

This is also a "phone survey". Asking someone whether or not they know the difference is not the same as them knowing the difference.

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.

Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[froggero1]

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

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[cayenne8]

I dunno...I think it says the average person, is an idiot. And, if you've ever had to work retail or food service while growing up...this will confirm that this is true. And NOT just with computer use...

:-)

Re:Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.

[anonicon]

"I think it says the average person, is an idiot."

Yes-indeedee, you are correct. Hopefully, with the proliferation of braindead, thought-numbing programming like "Survivor," "Who's My Daddy," and "The Bachelorette," more marginal cases will slide down the tube that precludes them from ever having to think critically, thus freeing up salary and promotion space for the rest of us.

>;-)

Survey Says Irishdaze Confused By Math

[Some guy named Chris]

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.

Survey Says...

[ackthpt]

"ABC News is reporting that apparently only 18% of adult web searchers can tell the difference between actual search results and advertisements.

<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

Because

[American AC in Paris]

This shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. People don't pay that much attention to to what they are reading.

For example, re-read this post. Carefully.

submitter is confused

[Anarchos]

"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.

Re:Quite true.

[govtcheez]

I feel like I'm watching one of those shittacular closed-circuit news shows produced by high schoolers, for highschoolers.

"Oh my god, and in the news today, CmdrTaco reposted a story about Linux and I saw Hemos cheating on his girlfriend after third period! What a total slut! OK, now here's CowboyNeal with today's lunch menu!"

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: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:you insensitive clod !

[MightyMartian]

Well, when I was a kid, all we had was gears and sprockets. I mean, how the hell do you tell color on gears and sprockets? Loading a 1k web page took the better part of a week and forty tons of coal. Then some f*cker invented Javascript.

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.