Can Visible Cues of Search Results Tell Vendors' Reliability?

A search engine provides two distinct types of results, organic and paid, each of which uses different mechanisms for selecting and ranking relevant Web pages for a query. For an e-commerce query, vendors represented by websites in these organic and paid results are expected to have varying reliability ratings, such as a satisfactory or unsatisfactory score from the Business Bureau (BBB) based on overall customer experiences. In this paper we empirically examine how vendors’ reliability ratings in BBB are associated with cues (such as type of result, relative price, number of sites selling the product) that can be observed or derived from search results, and further we attempt to predict vendors’ BBB reliability ratings using those cues.