Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
Sponsored Search
Impact
Directed
Closed
Undirected
Open
Primarily searchers
who are conducting
research on which
products might
address their need
and transitioning to
comparison shopping
Searchers who know
where they want to
gho; opportunities for
branding
List
Informational
Find
Advice
to Tr ansactional
Navigational
to Informational
Online
Offline
Free
Searchers who have
completed most of
their research and are
now looking to buy or
abtain.
Those looking for
'free' may need to be
filtered out.
The SERP is good
place to provide other
contact information.
Obtain
Download
Tr ansactional
Cost
Links
Other
Results Page
Interact
Figure 3.6. Hierarchy of user-intent classification with impact on sponsored search.
To investigate aggregate information behavior, let us once again begin with the
concept of search, but instead of search as a set of individual actions, let us consider
search as an economic concept.
When we do this, we find that, unlike at the individual level where we had little
more than guidelines, we can not only develop rules at the aggregate level but also
make some fairly accurate predictions on this information behavior.
Potpourri
: In his seminal science fiction series,
The Foundation Trilogy
, Isaac
Asimov introduced the concept of
psychohistory
, an inferential scientific dis-
cipline based on the premise that, with enough data, one could predict what a
set of people would do, even if one could not predict what an individual person
would do.
For many years, this was just science fiction.
Not any longer.
The massive amount of data collectable on the Web is providing insights into
advertising, customer behavior, language translation, financial markets, disease
outbreaks, election outcomes, and many other situations.
So, Asimov might have been on to something. The data is just now catching up.
Let us briefly discuss consumer searching; we will address consumer searching in
more detail in Chapter 5. However, we need some background on it to make sense of
our discussion on keyterm selection. We anchor our discussion in that of consumer
search research [
58
].
