Competing for users' attention: on the interplay between organic and sponsored search results

Queries on major Web search engines produce complex result pages, primarily composed of two types of information: organic results, that is, short descriptions and links to relevant Web pages, and sponsored search results, the small textual advertisements often displayed above or to the right of the organic results. Strategies for optimizing each type of result in isolation and the consequent user reaction have been extensively studied; however, the interplay between these two complementary sources of information has been ignored, a situation we aim to change. Our findings indicate that their perceived relative usefulness (as evidenced by user clicks) depends on the nature of the query. Specifically, we found that for navigational queries there is a clear competition between ads and organic results, while for nonnavigational queries this competition turns into synergy. We also investigate the relationship between the perceived usefulness of the ads and their textual similarity to the...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: WWW
• Authors: Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Andrei Z. Broder, Evgeniy Gabrilovich, Vanja Josifovski, Bo Pang
• Keywords: Incidental Ads, Internet Technology, Navigational Queries, Responsive Ads, WWW 2010