Does brandname influence perceived search result quality? Yahoo!, Google, and WebKumara

Improving the quality of search engine results is the goal of costly efforts by major Web search engine companies. Using in situ side-by-side result set comparisons and random assignment of brandnames to result sets, we investigated whether perceptions of quality were influenced by brand association. In the first experiment (15 searchers) we found no significant preference for or against results labelled “Google” relative to those labelled “Yahoo!”. In the second experiment (20 searchers) result sets were again generated by Google and Yahoo! but were randomly labelled “Yahoo!” or “WebKumara” (a fictitious name). Again, we found no significant preference for one brandname label over the other. Contrary to previous findings, we found a statistically significant preference for Googlegenerated results over those of Yahoo! when data from three separate experiments (total 70 subjects) was combined.