[Sigia-l] Random Search Results

[William Bakker]

Hello,

On our travel planning website, we have the ability for users to
search for tourism businesses:
http://www.hellobc.com/en-CA/SearchResultsListings/BritishColumbia.htm?CATID=-1&LOCID=-1&KWDS=&NBY=False&FLID=3&PN=1

These businesses are purchasing listings from us to be featured on the
website. Our sales department is pushing hard for "equitable
rotation", meaning randomize the search results instead of sorting by
alpha. I'm more of a fan to allow more filtering but that doesn't seem
to be a convincing argument. We just implemented this so I don't have
enough data to measure the exposure yet.

Does anybody have any experience with randomized search results and is
there any research data out there you know of?

Regards,

William