Do Searchers Search More Over Time?

A paper from 2004 recently fell into my hands. It's from the journal Management Science, so you'll have to go there to get the paper (you'll need an account). As is usual in journal papers nowadays, it has five authors, Johnson, Moe, Fader, Bellman, and Lohse.

They did several studies, partly focused on asking whether people use search more often as they get more experienced on the Web. They also looked at how much people searched for sites when they wanted to buy something.

The results might be surprising to some - even in the age of search, users don't like to check out a lot of e-commerce stores. The majority prefer to settle on a few stores and go there rather than constantly checking out new ones. And even when they get more experienced with search, they don't use it much more. And they found that users don't search as much as you'd think.

None of it surprises me, although they didn't account for some factors, like age. Marketers have long known that past a certain age, the willingness to try new brands drops like a stone. The authors didn't break out sessions by individuals, but by households, so there's likely to be a lot of slop to the data.

The question that occurs to me is whether, if such brand loyalty online is real, it's due to actual loyalty, or reluctance to tangle with a new interface. E-commerce isn't so much like brick-and-mortar shopping as it like operating software, and few users enjoy mastering new software. Is it the label, or the comfort level?

There's also the fact that many users dislike searching unless they know a strong keyword. Look for "toilet seat" and you're likely to find an online hardware store. Search for "pens" and you'll end up with specialty stores, stationers, and collector sites, all of which have to sifted. Google is good, but it's not clairvoyant.