The Influence of Commercial Intent of Search Results on Their Perceived Relevance
This addresses the impact of commercial bias on search engine users, though it is incremental as it compares existing engines without proposing new methods.
The study examined how the commercial intent of search results affects perceived relevance across Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, finding that Google provides significantly more commercial results, but this intent did not influence relevance judgments.
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.