Search Engine Optimisation Web Log (BLOG)
Editor: Matt Paines

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Branding matters online

New research has found that branding is important on the internet - especially when it comes to search.

Researchers at a US university found that 'some emotional branding' was having an effect on search results.

The team at Penn State's College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) wanted to find out why internet users only go to a handful of search engines when there are around 4,000 that have similar technologies and interfaces.

They used the same queries for different search engines and then showed the results to participants who were asked to evaluate the engines' performance in returning relevant information.

Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search.

One of the authors of The Effect of Brand Awareness on the Evaluation of Search Engine Results, Jim Jansen said that given there was no difference in the results, all of the search engines should have had exactly the same score. But there were marked differences in how the respondents rated the results.

Given that many of the participants said they used Google to search, Jansen said he was surprised that Yahoo! came out on top.

M.P

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