Domain Bias
Wed, 12/28/2011 - 18:36 — admin
Domain Bias
Microsoft research found that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time.
Microsoft had done research that confirms that high quality domains attract more website visitors. The experiments conducted by the team demonstrated a “propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain.” The authors used the term “domain bias”. The bias leads users to click on a webpage that is associated with a “quality” domain more often than others.
Similar to domain bias, there are other biases such as “position bias” and “snippet bias.”
- Position bias: it is the likelihood that people will click on search results toward the top of a page more than they will those toward the bottom.
- Snippet bias is the tendency for searchers to click a search result that displays the text most relevant to their search query.
- Domain bias: a user's propensity to believe that a page is more relevant just because it comes from a particular domain.
The experiments filtered out position and snippet bias to conclude that domain bias exists and importance of reputable domains. They provided evidence of the existence of domain bias in click activity as well as in human judgments via a comprehensive collection of experiments. They began by studying the difference between domains that a search engine surfaces and that users click. Surprisingly, they found that despite changes in the overall distribution of surfaced domains, there has not been a comparable shift in the distribution of clicked domains. Users seem to have learned the landscape of the internet and their click behavior has thus become more predictable over time. Next, they run a blind domain test, akin to a Pepsi/Coke taste test, to determine whether domains can shift a user’s opinion of which page is more relevant. They found that domains can actually flip a user’s preference about 25% of the time. Finally, we demonstrate the existence of systematic domain preferences, even after factoring out confounding issues such as position bias and relevance, two factors that have been used extensively in past work to explain user behavior. The existence of domain bias has numerous consequences including, for example, the importance of discounting click activity from reputable domains.
In addition to this Microsoft study, it is well known paid ads with quality, keyword-rich domains perform better in PPC campaigns. Compared to marketing dollars spent in Google AdWords and Microsoft AdCenter, domain purchase is more worthwhile.