TY - JOUR
T1 - In Google we trust
T2 - Users' decisions on rank, position, and relevance
AU - Pan, Bing
AU - Hembrooke, Helene
AU - Joachims, Thorsten
AU - Lorigo, Lori
AU - Gay, Geri
AU - Granka, Laura
PY - 2007/4
Y1 - 2007/4
N2 - An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.
AB - An eye tracking experiment revealed that college student users have substantial trust in Google's ability to rank results by their true relevance to the query. When the participants selected a link to follow from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards links higher in position even if the abstracts themselves were less relevant. While the participants reacted to artificially reduced retrieval quality by greater scrutiny, they failed to achieve the same success rate. This demonstrated trust in Google has implications for the search engine's tremendous potential influence on culture, society, and user traffic on the Web.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=34249980619&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=34249980619&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00351.x
DO - 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00351.x
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:34249980619
SN - 1083-6101
VL - 12
SP - 801
EP - 823
JO - Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
JF - Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication
IS - 3
ER -