188,246 research outputs found
User Satisfaction in Competitive Sponsored Search
We present a model of competition between web search algorithms, and study
the impact of such competition on user welfare. In our model, search providers
compete for customers by strategically selecting which search results to
display in response to user queries. Customers, in turn, have private
preferences over search results and will tend to use search engines that are
more likely to display pages satisfying their demands.
Our main question is whether competition between search engines increases the
overall welfare of the users (i.e., the likelihood that a user finds a page of
interest). When search engines derive utility only from customers to whom they
show relevant results, we show that they differentiate their results, and every
equilibrium of the resulting game achieves at least half of the welfare that
could be obtained by a social planner. This bound also applies whenever the
likelihood of selecting a given engine is a convex function of the probability
that a user's demand will be satisfied, which includes natural Markovian models
of user behavior.
On the other hand, when search engines derive utility from all customers
(independent of search result relevance) and the customer demand functions are
not convex, there are instances in which the (unique) equilibrium involves no
differentiation between engines and a high degree of randomness in search
results. This can degrade social welfare by a factor of the square root of N
relative to the social optimum, where N is the number of webpages. These bad
equilibria persist even when search engines can extract only small (but
non-zero) expected revenue from dissatisfied users, and much higher revenue
from satisfied ones
Understanding User Behavioral Intention to Adopt a Search Engine that Promotes Sustainable Water Management
An increase in usersâ online searches, the social concern for an efficient management of resources such as water, and the appearance of more and more digital platforms for sustainable purposes to conduct online searches lead us to reflect more on the usersâ behavioral intention with respect to search engines that support sustainable projects like water management projects. Another issue to consider is the factors that determine the adoption of such search engines. In the present study, we aim to identify the factors that determine the intention to adopt a search engine, such as Lilo, that favors sustainable water management. To this end, a model based on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) is proposed. The methodology used is the Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis with the Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS). The results demonstrate that individuals who intend to use a search engine are influenced by hedonic motivations, which drive their feeling of contentment with the search. Similarly, the success of search engines is found to be closely related to the ability a search engine grants to its users to generate a social or environmental impact, rather than usersâ trust in what they do or in their results. However, according to our results, habit is also an important factor that has both a direct and an indirect impact on usersâ behavioral intention to adopt different search engines
The egalitarian effect of search engines
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social
activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its
size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users
according to their page-ranking strategies, and some have argued that they
create a vicious cycle that amplifies the dominance of established and already
popular sites. We show that, contrary to these prior claims and our own
intuition, the use of search engines actually has an egalitarian effect. We
reconcile theoretical arguments with empirical evidence showing that the
combination of retrieval by search engines and search behavior by users
mitigates the attraction of popular pages, directing more traffic toward less
popular sites, even in comparison to what would be expected from users randomly
surfing the Web.Comment: 9 pages, 8 figures, 2 appendices. The final version of this e-print
has been published on the Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 103(34), 12684-12689
(2006), http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/103/34/1268
Search Engines, Social Media, and the Editorial Analogy
Deconstructing the âeditorial analogy,â and analogical reasoning more generally, in First Amendment litigation involving powerful tech companies
Auditing Search Engines for Differential Satisfaction Across Demographics
Many online services, such as search engines, social media platforms, and
digital marketplaces, are advertised as being available to any user, regardless
of their age, gender, or other demographic factors. However, there are growing
concerns that these services may systematically underserve some groups of
users. In this paper, we present a framework for internally auditing such
services for differences in user satisfaction across demographic groups, using
search engines as a case study. We first explain the pitfalls of na\"ively
comparing the behavioral metrics that are commonly used to evaluate search
engines. We then propose three methods for measuring latent differences in user
satisfaction from observed differences in evaluation metrics. To develop these
methods, we drew on ideas from the causal inference literature and the
multilevel modeling literature. Our framework is broadly applicable to other
online services, and provides general insight into interpreting their
evaluation metrics.Comment: 8 pages Accepted at WWW 201
Reputation Management and Social Media: How People Monitor Their Identity and Search for Others Online
Based on a survey, analyzes trends in how adults maintain online reputations, including monitoring via search engines and customizing privacy settings on profiles by age group. Examines the role of online information in employment and social interactions
Internet and Users. Who is the Reader?
Internet has turned into a fundamental component of everyday life, as it plays a major role in
advancing the globalization process. Globalization was fostered by the idea of creating equalaccess
opportunities for all and facilitating communication worldwide. Using internet as the core
platform, billions of people try to access and benefit from this opportunity through search
engines, service providers, websites and social media. However, given the profound difference
between internet and userâs languages, users end up on relying on search engines and tools to
translate their ideas into a computer-readable language and derive information from them.
In order to provide the best possible services, search engines and social media need to
accumulate comprehensive data on each userâs identity. The challenge is that once they are fed
with convenient information on each user, they tend to personalize the idea they grasp of him or
her based on their given regulations and policies, which in the mid- and long-term results in
managing usersâ access to information..
By applying the reader-response theory, this paper seeks to focus on the challenges stemming
from the adoption of usersâ personalized profiles by Google, Facebook and Amazon as the most
common part of usersâ performance in internet. It also explores how the reading differences of
the users and the tools result not only in personalized versions of users, but also engender an
unrecognized virtual in-betweenness of usersâ own perception of themselves and the toolsâ
perception of users
- âŠ