Abstract
The current paper presents a heuristic evaluation mechanism describing the online search behavior of decision makers (DMs) as determined by the credibility of the rankings displayed by search engines. We formalize the incentives of DMs to observe and evaluate alternatives through a pairwise comparison function that accounts for both the ranking positions displayed and the credibility of the search engine. The resulting evaluation framework is implemented to analyze the effects that ranking credibility has on the online search behavior of DMs. In particular, we compare the cumulative frequencies derived from the implementation of the pairwise heuristic evaluation mechanism with the average traffic shares of the different items ranked within a Google result page.