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An empirical investigation on search engine ad disclosure
Author(s) -
Lewandowski Dirk,
Kerkmann Friederike,
Rümmele Sandra,
Sünkler Sebastian
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
journal of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.903
H-Index - 145
eISSN - 2330-1643
pISSN - 2330-1635
DOI - 10.1002/asi.23963
Subject(s) - task (project management) , computer science , german , information retrieval , search engine , world wide web , empirical research , mathematics , engineering , statistics , systems engineering , archaeology , history
This representative study of German search engine users ( N = 1,000) focuses on the ability of users to distinguish between organic results and advertisements on Google results pages. We combine questions about Google's business with task‐based studies in which users were asked to distinguish between ads and organic results in screenshots of results pages. We find that only a small percentage of users can reliably distinguish between ads and organic results, and that user knowledge of Google's business model is very limited. We conclude that ads are insufficiently labelled as such, and that many users may click on ads assuming that they are selecting organic results.