24 x 7 Services
The Google, Yahoo!, and Bing search engines combine advertising and search results on their search results pages. In each case, the adverts are designed to look like the search results, except for minor visual distinctions such as their background colour and/or placement on the page. Further, the appearance of the adverts on all major search engines is so similar to the genuine search results that a large majority of search engine users cannot effectively distinguish between them.
Because so few ordinary users (38% according to Pew) realised that many of the highest placed 'results' on search engine results pages were actually adverts, it became important within the search engine optimization industry to distinguish between the two types of content. As the perspective among general users was that all the results were in fact 'results', the qualifier 'organic' was invented to distinguish the real search results from the adverts. Because the distinction is important (and the word 'organic' has many useful metaphorical uses) the term is now in widespread use within the search engine optimisation and web marketing industry. It is, as of July 2009, now in common currency outside the specialist web marketing industry, being used frequently by Google (throughout the Google Analytics site for instance).
Google claims that their users click (organic) search results more often than adverts, which has led them to rebutt the research cited above.
The same report (and others going back to 1997) by Pew shows that users avoid clicking 'results' that they know to be adverts.
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Organic_search
An organic search engine is a manually operated search service which uses a combination of computer algorithims and human researchers to look up a search query. A search query submitted to an organic search engine is analysed by a human operator who researches the query then formats the response to the user.
Search engine queries are limited to searching for key words, which may result in many false positives. Organic search engines avoid this issue as a human researcher is able to interpret the intent of the query and reject the false positives. The human and software combination ensures the responses from an organic search engine are accurate to the intent of the queries, however due to this combination a delay is introduced in receiving the response.
The delay inherent in the design of organic search engines ultimately limits their application. Organic search engines are thus found where users are seeking a direct answer to a particular query and are prepared to either wait or even pay for the response. Premium organic search engines include the SMS query services such as Australia's 199query and United Kingdom's AQA which provide answers researched by human operators and charge for the response. Community organic search engines where query results are provided by humans include Sproose, Yahoo Answers, Answerly, Mahalo Answers and the now defunct NowNow from Amazon.
