Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that people go for brand names on the Internet just as they do in the real world, according to new research presented at the Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, California.
This is in line with the finding last year by German researchers who showed using MRI scans that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in people's brains.
Researchers in the Penn State College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) copied Google results pages from four different e-commerce queries, but told the 32 participants who evaluated the results that they were from four different search engines: Google, MSN Live Search, Yahoo! and an in-house engine created for the study.
The queries included “camping Mexico,” “laser removal,” “manufactured home” and “techno music.”
Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.
“Given that there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had the exact same score,” said Jim Jansen, assistant professor and lead researcher. “Some emotional branding is having an effect here.” Jansen and co-author, Mimi Zhang, an IST graduate student, detailed the study in a paper, “The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results.”
The researchers were trying to understand why Web users gravitate toward a handful of trusted search engines when there are about 4,000 of them that have similar technologies and similar interfaces.
The performance, defined as the ratio of relevant documents to the total number returned at some point in the results listing, of those search engines also is practically the same.
To determine each engine's “performance,” participants rated the returned results on a three-point scale: very relevant, somewhat relevant, and not relevant. After averaging the scores, the researcher determined an average -- about 36 percent of all results were judged relevant to the query.
The researchers then looked at each engine’s “score” to determine whether it fell above or below the average.
Participants ranked results from Yahoo! more relevant across the four queries.
Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen said he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top. Its total scores were 15 percent above the average for the four queries while Google’s total scores were just 0.7 percent above the average. Future research will consider whether participants “carried over” satisfaction with other products when ranking search engines, Jansen said.
AI2RS, the search engine created in-house with no brand-name recognition, fared the worst. The researchers calculated its average precision rating as 10 percent below the average although AI2RS had the highest score when the query was “laser removal.”
The study ties branding not just to product identification but also to product performance, Jansen said.
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