investigating the relevance of sponsored results for web ecommerce queries
Are sponsored links, the primary business model for Web search engines, providing Web consumers with relevant results? This research addresses this issue by investigating the relevance of sponsored and non-sponsored links for ecommerce queries from the major search engines. The results show that average relevance ratings for sponsored and non-sponsored links are virtually the same, although the relevance ratings for sponsored links are statistically higher. We used 108 ecommerce queries and 8,256 retrieved links for these queries from three major Web search engines, Google, MSN, and Yahoo!. We present the implications for Web search engines and sponsored search as a long-term business model as well as a mechanism for finding relevant information for searchers.
sponsored results sponsored links web search engines web searching sponsored search ecommerce searching