market research, preference

The $2 million cements a kind of symbiotic relationship that has existed between Google and Wikimedia—and specifically Wikipedia—for some time. As most people have probably noticed, when you do a search for almost any topic, there is usually a Wikipedia link high up in the results (the site apparently gets about 60% to 70% of its traffic from Google searches, according to a recent estimate by Jimmy Wales). But is that just good content winning or is it preferential treatment?

As Steven Quartz of the California Institute of Technology said during a recent discussion of ethics sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation, “Our brain is computing value at every fraction of a second. Everything that we look at, we form an implicit preference. Some of those make it into our awareness; some of them remain at the level of our unconscious, but ... what our brain is for, what our brain has evolved for, is to find what is of value in our environment.”

market research (市場研究 1926 新詞)：n. The gathering and evaluation of data regarding consumers' preferences for products and services.

Peter Drucker said, "If you offered me a million dollars of market research or a day in the kitchen with a housewife, I'd pick the kitchen.” ...

Wikipedia article "Market research".

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preference Hide phonetics
noun [C or U]
1 when you like something or someone more than another person or thing:
Her preference is for comfortable rather than stylish clothes.
I have a preference for sweet food over spicy.
Choosing furniture is largely a matter of personal preference.
It would be wrong to discriminate against a candidate because of their sexual preference (= the sex of the people they are sexually attracted to).

2 an advantage which is given to a person or a group of people:
We give preference to those who have worked with us for a long time.
Special preferences were offered initially to encourage investment.

preferential Hide phonetics
adjective [before noun]
describes something you are given which is better than what other people receive:
Inmates claimed that some prisoners had received preferential treatment.
Single mothers have been given preferential access to council housing.

preferentially Hide phonetics
adverb