Like other industries, companies that maintain search engines must work harder to recruit and retain customers. One way to do this is branding -- creating a cognitive impression that a user is likely to retain and rely on when making future decisions.
Jim Jansen, Penn State assistant professor of information sciences and technology, is investigating this process in a new project that examines branding among search engines, one of his main areas of study.
The search engine study will examine how users choose a search engine, how they evaluate that engine's performance in delivering the results they wanted, their reaction to the individual results, and the Web pages to which the search engine links.
"We are really interested in a multi-layered aspect of what causes a person to pick a particular search engine versus another one," Jansen said. "All these platforms are similar, why do customers view one particular platform as superior to the other?"
While companies like Google and Yahoo! have many successful applications, this project looks only at the search engines themselves and views them through a narrowly-constructed definition of branding.
Jansen said this approach will allow him to focus on what specific elements cause a user to choose one search engine over another and what role branding plays in the decision-making process.
The project, which is funded by $50,000 in unrestricted funds from Google, will expand on Jansen's previous research in this area.
"We have found that users will evaluate results from a major search engine at a higher level than from a lesser-known search engine," he said. "We hope to build a multi-layer model of branding in this area -- from search engine selection to evaluation of the final Web page chosen from the results."
Source: Penn State
Related stories:
Branding matters -- even when searching
Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that branding matters as much on the Internet as off, according to a Penn State study.
Microsoft-Yahoo: Which Products Would Win
While the chance of a Microsoft-Yahoo merger or acquisition is a remote one, it's still a possibility. In analysis compiled from several PC Magazine staff members and analysts, here's what a merger might mean to the products and technologies directly shared by each company. In each case, we've outlined the strengths and weaknesses of each, and attempted to predict what technologies would survive the backroom planning sessions, and what would be discarded. This story was written by Mark Hachman.
IAC completing split into 5 publicly traded parts
(AP) -- Barry Diller's IAC/InterActiveCorp is completing its split into five publicly traded companies Thursday - a move intended to give each business more focus and value than the previously cluttered whole.
Some eBay sellers frustrated with rule changes
(AP) -- Some people who sell things on eBay are fed up with new rules the company has been imposing in hopes of making the auction site more attractive to online shoppers. Now even more changes are coming in the next few weeks, but this time eBay Inc. hopes it can cool tempers.
Wikipedia founder aims to break Google stranglehold
Watch out Google -- Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales hopes that Wikia Search, a project he spearheads, will break Google's domination as the world's most widely used Internet search engine.
Olympic Games: Have we reached a plateau in terms of speed?
The world-record pace for the marathon continues to improve for both men and women. For men, the record pace for the marathon is now about as fast as the record pace for the 10,000-meter run just after World War II. Today, champion athletes are running more than four times farther at speeds of well under five minutes per mile.
Partial Eclipse, Total Fun
On Friday, August 1st, millions of people in Greenland, Siberia, Mongolia and China—especially China—are going to witness a total eclipse of the sun. The Moon's cool shadow will sweep across the landscape, silencing wildlife with sudden darkness, filling the sky with the sun's ghostly corona, transforming ordinary folks into life-long eclipse chasers. Mainstream media gives this sort of thing saturation coverage.
Yang accuses Microsoft of trying to destabilize Yahoo: report
Yahoo founder and chief executive Jerry Yang accused Microsoft of trying to destabilize Yahoo with no genuine intent to buy the company, the Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday.