Are people biased in their use of search engines?

The user search behavior when deciding which links to follow in rank-ordered results lists was investigated. The Google environment was simulated by systematically reversing Google's normal relevance ordering of the items presented to users. The key manipulation in the study was to compare user's responses when they received results lists in their normal ordering versus a systematically reversed order. The results lists returned to a given query were presented in either original relevance ordering or a reversed ordering in a counterbalanced way across trials of the experiment. The timing of each transaction was also recorded. Each participant received the results lists in a randomized order and the results in each list were also randomized for every participant. The results showed that people are partially biased in their search behavior.