Author(s)
Mark Glick, Gregory L. Richards, Margarita Sapozhnikov and Paul Seabright
Source
Working Paper, 2011
Summary
This paper demonstrates that a high rank on a search engine result page increases clicks to a web site.
Policy Relevance
Competition regulators may wish to consider search engine ranking decisions as a potential target for regulation in order to mitigate potential anticompetitive effects of altered search rankings.
Main Points
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Search engines are a major means of finding information and web sites, and a firm’s viability may depend on its visibility on search engines.
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Search engine users tend to click through sites returned near the top of a search result page.
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Useful sites are often ranked more highly, and it is difficult to determine whether highly-ranked sites are clicked more frequently because they are more useful or simply because they are located near the top of the list of results.
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Controlling for site relevance, search engine ranking has a very large effect on the rate at which search engine users clicked through to sites.
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All else equal, a site appearing at the top of a page of search results was clicked 5.3 to 26.1 percentage points higher than it was when placed outside of the top three results.
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Moving a link from the fourth spot (or lower) in the search rankings typically increased traffic through the search engine to the site by a factor of 6 to 30.
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These effects are produced by making the sites more conspicuous on the results page rather than by making a user more willing to click on the link having seen it.
