In order to bring long term buyers together with ethical, value driven sellers, there needs to be an educational process happening on the part of both. So, if you click on the cartoon to better read the caption, you will see that search engine users can have some naivety regarding a search engine's capabilities.
But, maybe the cartoon is not too far fetched. The development of artificial intelligence is being worked on by many search engines. If the "Personalization" goal is achieved, its Consortium says it will: "Better serve the customer by anticipating needs."
On page three of the 1/23/05 "PEW Internet & American Life Study" on Search Engine Users, it says: "Most internet users are naive about search engines." It goes on to say: "Overall, only about 1 in 6 searchers say they can consistently distinguish between paid and unpaid results." It then says: "This finding is particularly ironic, since nearly half of all users say they would stop using search engines if they thought engines were not being clear about how they present their paid results." (The PEW/Internet is part of the PEW Charitable Trusts )
With copper phone and internet cable being replaced with fiber optic all over the U.S., which will surely increase usage of the internet and search engines beyond what PEW's May-June 2005 Tracking Study of 2,001 adults shows (68 % now use the internet), the timing is crucial in my opinion to give those new and "increased usage" users a feeling of trust and credibility, and to minimize saturation, clutter, and intrusiveness on the internet in general. Do you agree?
Cartoon courtesy of "Microdoc News" (out of business) by way of Google Blogoscoped.
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