Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
technologies, the representation of relevant search results and increasing amount of travel
information. Finally, from the perspective of the tourism businesses and organizations, they have
to adapt to the changes brought about by both evolving technology and travellers as they seek
to gain visibility and further customers on search engines. They must adopt a series of search
engine practices as part of their strategy to gain a competitive advantage online.
Various studies have demonstrated this dynamic and co-evolving relationship. Users are
adapting to changing search engines with their changing behavior. For example, from 1997 to
2001, an analysis on search engine transaction logs from Excite showed that there were signifi cant
decreases in the percentages of searches on topics such as entertainment and pornography, and
signifi cant increases in searches for commerce and people (Jansen, Spink and Pedersen 2005).
Another study (Jansen and Spink 2005b) analyzed nine transaction log data from various search
engines; their results showed that recent search engine users used simpler queries and viewed
fewer result pages. They explain this phenomenon by search engines' algorithmic enhancements.
A similar study (Malaga 2007) analyzed AltaVista search engine log from 1998 to 2002, and
showed that recent users spent more time in one search session, typed in more keywords in a
query, viewed more result pages and had broader search topics in 2002. The differences might be
due to the different search engines analyzed. These studies indicated that users are changing
their search behavior in relation to available information on the Web and the different and
enhanced search algorithms.
From the information provider's perspective, tourism businesses and organizations have been
taking advantage of the knowledge of ranking algorithms and trying to reach to the top on
SERPs. They are in the forms of either legitimate format of SEM, endorsed by major search
engines, or more malevolent types, in the form of search engine spamming or Google bombing
(Bar-Ilan 2007). On one hand, industry cases have shown the successful SEM practices by desti-
nations and tourism businesses (Brusha 2009; Google 2007). On the other hand, knowledgeable
information providers, including common users and businesses, have been trying to use a variety
of techniques for their own advantage, which might be against search engine use policies (Chaffey
2009). For example, Google bombing is a collective behavior by Internet users to change the
positions of their web pages on Google by malicious hyperlinking (Sen 2005). For example, the
home page of the previous president George W. Bush of the United States used to be the top
Google result for the query 'miserable failure' due to the collective behavior of a number of
right-wing bloggers when they hyperlinked his homepage with those keywords as text anchors
(Bar-Ilan 2007). In addition, one common mistake businesses and organizations make relates to
keyword stuffi ng, which is placing too many keywords in the tags (Bar-Ilan 2004).
Search engines are also tweaking their algorithms to combat businesses' misuses and adapt to
changing user behavior. For example, Google adjusts their algorithms to stop search engine
'bombs' (eMarketer 2007). Search engines fought keyword spamming by decreasing the weight
applied to each keyword (Bar-Ilan 2004). When facing more sophisticated users, Google have
altered their interfaces, such as introducing Universal Search (blending images, blogs, videos and
other formats of results together in SERP) and search fi lters, allowing users to slice and dice
results (Google 2007a, 2009). The emerging Web 2.0 in terms of social media places a more
and more important role, since search engines have granted those sites more weight (Xiang and
Gretzel 2010). Recently, Google made a landmark change on their algorithm, termed Google
Panda, in which PageRank was downgraded in importance while it gave more weights to new
websites and social media sites (McCullagh 2011).
In general, dynamic and co-evolving relationships exist among travel information searchers,
tourism businesses and the search engines, as three actors in this search system. However, search
engines are only the technology which facilitates and mediates the connection between
