Brattain Studios

Search Engine Background

Written by Administrator Friday, 15 April 2011 18:16

The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the ads are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background color and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the ads on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.

Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew Research Center) realized that many of the highest placed "results" on search engine results pages were actually ads, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact "results", the qualifier "organic" was invented to distinguish the real search results from the ads. Because the distinction is important (and because the word "organic" has many metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimization and web marketing industry.

Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than ads. A recent report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking "results" that they know to be ads.

Users can avoid ads to be shown on their search, and list only organic search result by using browser add-ons/plug-ins, one of the most popular being AdBlock Plus (for Chrome, Firefox) very efficient and easy to use. Other browser may have different tools developed for blocking ads.