The Pew Internet and American Life Project has reported that 82-percent of Internet users don’t know the difference between a sponsored link and an organic listing in the search engines. These 82-percent do not know that “sponsor” means advertiser in search engine lingo and that sponsored links are paid advertisements that sandwich the unpaid, organic listings.
Of this same group, 45-percent said they would stop using search engines if they were not being clear about paid versus non-paid results.
To me, this just points out how new the Internet is relative to other media. At one point, the general public did not know the difference between infomercials and a half-hour television program. There used to be true stories until “based on a true story” started to crowd them out.
There is still an educational lag time when it comes to the general public and the Internet especially in regards to advertising and marketing.
The over-riding element will remain for most users, though, which is the relevance of the search results.
