An Empirical Analysis of Paid Placement in Chinese Web Search Engine Results

Web search engines provide information access to millions of users per day. For many people, Web search engine are now the primary method for finding information, news, and products. Major search engines offer at least two types of results on the results page, non-sponsored and sponsored results. The goal of this study is to get a better idea of how much of the entire first Web page displays non-sponsored results as compared to sponsored results in China. Results are that, for general search tools like Google China, 85.07% of the first Web page results are non-sponsored results. For search engine Baidu China, 56.43% of the first page contains non-sponsored results. If take the inconspicuous sponsored results (sponsored results that are integrated with non-sponsored results that appear similar to non-sponsored results and are unlabeled) into consideration, it makes a significant difference in the percentage of non-sponsored results returned by both two Web search engines. Other results include that query term length can also have a significant effect on the percentage of sponsored results displayed by both two Web search engines. The research may be useful supplements to other studies of compare search engines that are being tried by search engine researchers.