Web users too trusting of search engine results

Stony Stevenson writes: An eye-tracking experiment published in the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication revealed that, when college student web users selected a link from Google's result pages, their decisions were strongly biased towards higher ranking links. However, this bias was found to persist even if the more highly-placed content was less relevant to the search query than entries at the bottom of the list.

This has important long-term implications for search engine results, according to the researchers, as this type of use affects future rankings. "The way that college students conduct online searches promotes a 'rich-get-richer' phenomenon where popular sites get more hits regardless of relevance," they explained.