Do Web Site Visitors Vary in Their Search and Surf Behavior?

Related Literature

Research on search behavior has focused on the use of search engines and surf activities on a specific Web site. The present study addresses a cross-site question and provides insights into the information search and the search process. As the focus of the present study is on the behavior of Web site visitors, a brief overview of search engine usage is presented below.

Search engines usually display two sets of search results: so-called organic results and search engine advertisements. Organic results are the outcome of the index retrieval and relevance ranking applied by a search engine. For search engine advertisements, advertisers bid a value that they are willing to pay for each click on their advertisement. These advertisements are then positioned according to an automated generalized second-price auction (Edelman et al., 2007; Varian, 2007). Besides the bid amount, the auctioning mechanism may also incorporate additional quality criteria (Aggarwal et al., 2008; Gonen & Vassilvitskii, 2008).