How Does Page Rank Affect User Choice in Online Search?
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ARTICLE 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.
KEY TAKEAWAYS
- 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.
- Search engine users tend to click through sites returned near the top of a search result page.
- 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.
- Controlling for site relevance, search engine ranking has a very large effect on the rate at which search engine users clicked through to sites.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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About Gregory L. Richards
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About Margarita Sapozhnikov
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About Mark Glick
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About Paul Seabright
Professor Seabrights is an IDEI researcher and member of the Toulouse Scshool of Economics. His research interests include micreconomic theory, theory of organization, industrial and competition policy, development economics, and transition economics.
Seabright is also the Chairman of Bruegel's Scientific Council, Managing Editor of Economic Policy (since 2001) and Research Fellow of the Center for Economic and Policy Research (since 1989).
