Are people biased in using search engines?
Cross-post from my technical blog
This is the abstruse question I read in the title of the article Communications of the ACM for February 2008. It turns out the author has in mind only that they press first of all those results that are on the first page, and there those that are above. As they say in America, "Duh! ..." Well, or as in Russia, "America discovered!". Or there is a bicycle. Not the first year of SEO - Search Engine Optimization - revolves around this simple fact, and Mark Keene, Mave O'Brien and Barry Smith - the authors of this article - just opened, and even the little article in the not very seedy scientific journal squeezed. That only in life does not happen!
In general, the article and the mention would not deserve it if the guys had not done an interesting practical study. A very simple experiment - a pseudo-site that looks just like Google, moreover, it also takes results from the same Google, only shows them in reverse order. Well, what do you think? Indeed, the people continued to click on the latest search results as actively as they clicked on the first.
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What leads to interesting reflections. Or maybe these are not so much prejudiced people as the results of search engines so far so lousy that the first results are not so very different from the last? Hmmm ... I do not know, honestly. What do you think?
1. Are they biased in use? by Mark T. Keane, Maeve O'Brien, and Barry Smyth - Communications of ACM , February 2008, Vol. 51, No. 2, p.49-53.
This is the abstruse question I read in the title of the article Communications of the ACM for February 2008. It turns out the author has in mind only that they press first of all those results that are on the first page, and there those that are above. As they say in America, "Duh! ..." Well, or as in Russia, "America discovered!". Or there is a bicycle. Not the first year of SEO - Search Engine Optimization - revolves around this simple fact, and Mark Keene, Mave O'Brien and Barry Smith - the authors of this article - just opened, and even the little article in the not very seedy scientific journal squeezed. That only in life does not happen!
In general, the article and the mention would not deserve it if the guys had not done an interesting practical study. A very simple experiment - a pseudo-site that looks just like Google, moreover, it also takes results from the same Google, only shows them in reverse order. Well, what do you think? Indeed, the people continued to click on the latest search results as actively as they clicked on the first.
')
What leads to interesting reflections. Or maybe these are not so much prejudiced people as the results of search engines so far so lousy that the first results are not so very different from the last? Hmmm ... I do not know, honestly. What do you think?
1. Are they biased in use? by Mark T. Keane, Maeve O'Brien, and Barry Smyth - Communications of ACM , February 2008, Vol. 51, No. 2, p.49-53.
Source: https://habr.com/ru/post/20432/
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