Open AccessIn Google We Trust: Users’ Decisions on Rank, Position, and Relevance
Author(s) -
Pan Bing,
Hembrooke Helene,
Joachims Thorsten,
Lorigo Lori,
Gay Geri,
Granka Laura
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00351.x
Subject(s) - relevance (law) , rank (graph theory) , position (finance) , computer science , internet privacy , information retrieval , world wide web , psychology , data science , political science , business , mathematics , finance , combinatorics , law
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.