A recent study surveyed in detail how people use search engines. Included in the report are things like the most popular searches, what people do and don’t search for, and how trusting people are of the results.

One surprising result is that almost 2/3 of users are not aware of the distinction between paid and unpaid results.

In addition to the results ranked by the search engines’s logic, businesses pay the search engines to list them when certain keywords are searched. Those results are listed apart from the main results however, and are easy to distinguish.

Its not that the paid results are necessarily wrong – but users should understand which they are looking at.

Read the report

Read a Wired article