The Influence of Commercial Intent of Search Results on Their Perceived Relevance

TL;DR

This study evaluates how commercial intent in search results affects perceived relevance across major search engines, finding that commercial results are prevalent but do not influence relevance judgments.

Contribution

It provides an empirical comparison of commercial intent and relevance perceptions across Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo search engines.

Findings

Google has more commercial results than others.

Commercial intent does not affect relevance judgments.

All engines show a high presence of commercial results.

Abstract

We carried out a retrieval effectiveness test on the three major web search engines (i.e., Google, Microsoft and Yahoo). In addition to relevance judgments, we classified the results according to their commercial intent and whether or not they carried any advertising. We found that all search engines provide a large number of results with a commercial intent. Google provides significantly more commercial results than the other search engines do. However, the commercial intent of a result did not influence jurors in their relevance judgments.