The effect of brand awareness on the evaluation of search engine results

Bernard J. Jansen*, Mimi Zhang, Ying Zhang

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

In this paper we investigate the effect of search engine brand (i.e., identifying name that distinguishes a product from its competitors) on evaluation of system performance. Our research is motivated by the large amount of search traffic directed to less than a handful of Web search engines, even though many are of equal technical quality with similar interfaces. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 32 participants measuring the effect of four search engine brands while controlling for the quality of search engine results. Based on average relevance ratings, there was a 25% difference between the most highly rated search engine and the lowest, even though search engine results were identical in both content and presentation. We discuss implications for search engine marketing and the design of empirical studies measuring search engine quality.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationSIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007, CHI 2007 Extended Abstracts
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages2471-2476
Number of pages6
ISBN (Print)1595936424, 9781595936424
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2007
Externally publishedYes
Event25th SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007, CHI 2007 - San Jose, CA, United States
Duration: 28 Apr 20073 May 2007

Publication series

NameConference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings

Conference

Conference25th SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007, CHI 2007
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CitySan Jose, CA
Period28/04/073/05/07

Keywords

  • Search engines
  • User intent
  • Web queries
  • Web searching

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