An empirical investigation into the effects of web search characteristics on decisions associated with impression formation

It is now common knowledge that information on the World Wide Web is used by people to acquire facts before making decisions—a key activity being forming impressions about other people. Given this, an interesting question arises as to whether and how such impressions may be biased by the characteristics of the information source itself. For instance, in the case of search results about a person, do the quantity and order of results affect the impression formed about the person in question? The question takes on significance considering that these factors may affect decisions of considerable importance and tangible consequence such as those regarding employment, for example, and at the same time, such factors are largely outside the control of the individuals affected. In this paper we refer to searchable digital information about a person on the Web as ePersona, and the impression formed about the person based on the perception as ePerception. Using Web search results, we studied the impacts of order and quantity of results on ePerception using an experiment. Our findings suggest that the order or ranking of results about a search target impacts the impression formed about that target. We also found that the quantity of search results alone does not seem to impact the impression formed.