While we’re busy arguing organic vs. ppc from a marketer’s point of view, Gord was putting together a great post about actual search user behavior. Definitely worth a read.
Look, David Pasternak can ring the funeral bell for organic all he wants, but the fact is, it’s not his call. It’s the user’s. Yahoo has actually done exactly what he and Kevin are predicting. They’ve moved organic down the page, jamming more sponsored on the top. Based on Did It’s comments, this should be good for the user, right? It should be more relevant, pushing the "spam" down below the fold. Wrong. Google kicked Yahoo’s ass in user experience in our latest study by every metric we looked at. And they’re definitely winning in the big picture, including stock prices. The difference. About 14% of Yahoo’s screen real estate (at 1024 by 768 pixels) was reserved for top organic. 33% of Google’s real estate went for top organic.
My only real complaint with Gord’s post is the fact that he’s missing an R in Guerrilla. 
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4 Responses to “ Frog Talk Part 2 - Gord Speaks on Behalf of Searchers ”
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Fixed. That’s why I didn’t win the grade 5 spelling bee.
They had spelling bees back then, Gord? Golly, I don’t remember any.
Gord took a great angle on disproving what Did-It set out to show. Very well done.
Btw. Add to this the study done by Siteadvisor by McAfee earlier in may this year and updated this december.
May Study
http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/search_safety_may2006.html
December Update
http://www.siteadvisor.com/studies/search_safety_dec2006.html
Sponsored results are by far, more dangerous than organic.
Good find Carsten. This was not surprising to me at all but I had never seen a study on it.
“In our analysis, search engines’ sponsored (paid advertising) results are approximately three times as likely to lead to red and yellow sites as are organic (non-paid) results.
Most notably, sponsored results contain a larger percentage of scam sites than organic results. 4.1% of sponsored results are rated red or yellow for scams as compared to 0.1% of organic results. “