An Empirical Study of Paid Listings in Product Search and Purchase

Abstract

Pay-for-placement search has been described contradictorily as either the future business model of information retrieval on the Internet or as a deceptive nuisance for unsuspecting Web surfers. This study investigated user interaction with paid search listings during a set of naturalistic product search and purchase tasks. The study compared objective measures of how often these listings are used and subjective user opinions both during and after the task. Participants were more likely to view and select organic listings than paid listings. They also rated the organic results as more relevant for the shopping tasks and expressed suspicion of the paid listings. However, some users did use the paid listings and when the content was relevant there was no difference in the relevance ratings of the content pages themselves. A lack of neutral ratings for paid listings suggests that users will respond either negatively or positively to the paid listings, creating a difficult decision for online retailers and product search companies when considering whether to support paid search listings.