The Impact of Web Search Result Quality on Decision-Making

Jan Heinrich Merker, Lena Merker, Alexander Bondarenko

Abstract: People often search the Web for answers to comparative questions like “Is pasta healthier than pizza?” to inform everyday decisions. However, web search engines sometimes may return biased or low-quality results. Still, previous research has not considered the impact of varying search result quality, relevance, or stance on the users’ decision-making process. To close this gap, we conducted a user study on quality, relevance, and stance assessments of 120 Google search results retrieved for eight comparative questions. We asked study participants about their decision and confidence before and after seeing the top-4 search results and which results influenced their decision. Our study showed that (1) high-quality search results are more likely to influence a user’s decision, (2) topical relevance and search result quality have a similarly strong impact on decision-making, and (3) search results are more likely to influence decisions for factual comparative questions than for subjective questions.

External IDs:dblp:conf/clef/MerkerMB24