The impact of privacy indicators on search engine browsing patterns

Laboratory studies have shown that when online search en-gines’ results are annotated with privacy indicators, someconsumers will pay a premium to make purchases from sitesthat have better privacy policies. To examine whether pri-vacy indicators in search results also influence browsing be-havior outside the laboratory, we conducted a field studyin which participants used a search engine with privacy in-dicators. We collected over 15,000 search queries from 460participants over a 10-month period. We found that whensearch results were annotated with privacy indicators, par-ticipants were more likely to visit sites with high privacyratings, even when they appeared towards the bottom of thesearch results page. Sites with low privacy ratings did nothave significantly different visitation rates than sites withoutany privacy ratings