TY - GEN
T1 - Does brandname influence perceived search result quality? Yahoo!, Google, and WebKumara
AU - Bailey, Peter
AU - Thomas, Paul
AU - Hawking, David
PY - 2007
Y1 - 2007
N2 - Improving the quality of search engine results is the goal of costly efforts by major Web search engine companies. Using in situ side-by-side result set comparisons and random assignment of brandnames to result sets, we investigated whether perceptions of quality were influenced by brand association. In the first experiment (15 searchers) we found no significant preference for or against results labelled "Google" relative to those labelled "Yahoo!". In the second experiment (20 searchers) result sets were again generated by Google and Yahoo! but were randomly labelled "Yahoo!" or "WebKumara" (a fictitious name). Again, we found no significant preference for one brandname label over the other. Contrary to previous findings, we found a statistically significant preference for Googlegenerated results over those of Yahoo! when data from three separate experiments (total 70 subjects) was combined.
AB - Improving the quality of search engine results is the goal of costly efforts by major Web search engine companies. Using in situ side-by-side result set comparisons and random assignment of brandnames to result sets, we investigated whether perceptions of quality were influenced by brand association. In the first experiment (15 searchers) we found no significant preference for or against results labelled "Google" relative to those labelled "Yahoo!". In the second experiment (20 searchers) result sets were again generated by Google and Yahoo! but were randomly labelled "Yahoo!" or "WebKumara" (a fictitious name). Again, we found no significant preference for one brandname label over the other. Contrary to previous findings, we found a statistically significant preference for Googlegenerated results over those of Yahoo! when data from three separate experiments (total 70 subjects) was combined.
KW - Information retrieval
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=84876720876&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Conference contribution
SN - 9780646484372
T3 - ADCS 2007 - Proceedings of the Twelfth Australasian Document Computing Symposium
SP - 88
EP - 91
BT - ADCS 2007 - Proceedings of the Twelfth Australasian Document Computing Symposium
T2 - 12th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, ACDS 2007
Y2 - 10 December 2007 through 10 December 2007
ER -