Consumer Search

Marketing and consumer's search are two sides of the same coin: both are concerned with product/price information. Marketing and advertising represent sellers' initiative (searching for potential buyers), while search activities are undertaken by buyers who are looking for information about products and services.

In marketing, the issue is "targeting" audience to maximize the benefit of expenses. In search, locating relevant information is the goal. In both, costs must be compared with the amount of information sent/acquired.

Broadcast-based advertising has influenced marketers to think in terms of seller-to-buyer information dissemination. The two-way Internet communication enables the other way of information flow. Although marketers may want to stay with the familiar, there are significant economic gains from promoting buyer-initiated information search.

Among other reasons, the way database is compiled is still limited. Foremost, search database heavily rely on text strings when collecting information. The result is that there is no sure way of prioritizing these information and a way to match successfully with user queries.

Some sites use "hidden" words and phrases to influence data collection. For example, suppose Alice has a very popular site named "MapMaker's Cove." Bob may include that words in his HTML files and thus in the bot-generated index, so that when Charlie searches the database using "MapMaker", the result shows Bob's as well as Alice's sites.