Thanks to reader JG for this interesting writeup of a recent study on how brands effect search results. From it:
Web searchers who evaluated identical search-engine results overwhelmingly favored Yahoo! and Google, providing evidence that people go for brand names on the Internet just as they do in the real world, according to new research presented at the Computer/Human Interaction 2007 Conference in San Jose, California….
Despite the results pages being identical in content and presentation, participants indicated that Yahoo! and Google outperformed MSN Live Search and the in-house search engine.
I also found this very interesting:
This is in line with the finding last year by German researchers who showed using MRI scans that well-known brands activate positive emotional responses in people’s brains.