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information needs and their own mental images of the tourism experience and the idiosyncratic
nature of place.
Researchers have also studied users' interaction with the search engine interface and it was
found that the interface of search engines and the rank of web pages signifi cantly infl uence
which search results are chosen. For example, Henzinger (2007) found that the majority of
search engine users do not look beyond the fi rst three pages of search results. Pan
et al
. (2007)
found that the position of organic search results infl uences users' perception of relevance in a
non-linear way. Some studies also show that users are more likely to trust organic listings and
organic listings have a higher conversion rate (Jansen and Resnick 2005; Marketing Sherpa
2005). Last, Kim and Fesenmaier (2008) found that the words included in search engines results
have the potential to signifi cantly affect one's overall evaluation of a destination website.
The online tourism domain
A domain can be defi ned as a collection of all informational entities about a specifi c subject (Pan
and Fesenmaier 2006; Wöber 2006; Xiang, Wöber and Fesenmaier 2008). In the context of the
Internet, a domain is the collection of links, domain names and Web pages that contain texts,
images and audio/video fi les stored in hypertext formats. Therefore, the online tourism domain
is comprised of all informational entities that are related to travel. Werthner and Klein (1999)
proposed a conceptual framework to delineate the interaction between the consumer and the
industry suppliers with the Internet playing a facilitating and mediating role. From an information
search perspective, Pan and Fesenmaier (2006) used the term 'online tourism information space'
to describe the collection of hypertextual content available for travel information searchers.
More recently, Xiang
et al
. (2008) conceptualized the online tourism domain based upon the
integration of a number of theoretical perspectives in tourism studies including:
1 the industry perspective with the focus on the composition of the supply of tourism on the
Internet (Leiper 1979, 2008; Smith 1994);
2 the symbolic representation perspective describing the representation of tourism products
and related experiences provided by the industry in various forms (Cohen and Cooper 1986;
Dann 1997; Leiper 1990);
3 the travel behavior perspective including the activities and the supporting systems at different
stages of the travel experience (Crompton 1992; Pearce 1982; Woodside and Dubelaar 2002);
and
4 the travel information search perspective emphasizing the information sought to support
travel experiences (e.g. Fodness and Murray 1998; Gursoy and McLeary 2004; Vogt and
Fesenmaier 1998).
Wöber (2006) examined one very important aspect of the tourism domain, i.e. the visibility of
tourism enterprises, particularly destination marketing organizations and individual hotel opera-
tions in Europe. His study indicates that many tourism websites suffer from very low rankings,
which makes it extremely diffi cult for online travellers to directly access individual tourism
websites. Xiang
et al
.'s (2008) analysis of the tourism domain suggests that the representation of
the tourism industry through one of the most important interfaces, i.e. a search engine, is
extremely rich, refl ecting the idiosyncratic nature of destinations and travellers' heterogeneous
information needs. In addition, their study demonstrated that popular search engines largely
defi ne the representation of the domain and, thus, shape the way online travellers and tourism
suppliers use the Internet.
