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Examining Organic and Sponsored Search Results: A Vendor Reliability Perspective

Search engines have become a de facto gateway for people to finding information or shopping online. The reliability of companies in search results is critical as search engines determine what information people access. Major search engines provide two types of results — organic and paid. While paid results have been an advertising boon for search engines, they are expected to contain more commercial bias than organic results. Thus it is important to understand whether the reliability of vendors in paid results is comparable to that in organic ones. Using two types of products and company reliability ratings, we compare paid with organic results from three popular search engines based on the number of vendors, number of satisfactory and unsatisfactory vendors, average price, lowest price, and price dispersion. Our findings have serious implications for Web consumers' selections on paid results and highlight the need for search engines to factor in reliability.