What Is a Search Cost?

Information search cost refers to the sum of various fees, time, energy and various risks paid to find the lowest price of an item in the market.

Information search costs

Right!

Information search cost refers to the sum of various fees, time, energy and various risks paid to find the lowest price of an item in the market.

Chinese name

Information search costs

Category

Sum of various risks

begins at

Research on consumer product purchase behavior

Constitute

Cost of obtaining target information

The concept of information search cost originates from the research on consumer purchase behavior. As consumers and businesses

From a broad perspective, information search is not only suitable for consumers' buying behaviors, but also can be used to describe all active information collection and screening to meet specific needs

Experimental psychology often refers to signal detection theory in information theory to describe many information behaviors of people. According to this theory, there are four types of human responses to information: hits, correct rejections, false reports, and underreports. Among them, hit refers to successfully finding the target information, correct rejection refers to successfully eliminating the information noise, false reporting refers to the noise as target information, and false reporting refers to the target information as noise. Therefore, a successful information search must be a collection of the first two: successfully find the target information and exclude the information noise. So we can get the formula:

Information search cost = cost of obtaining target information + cost of eliminating information noise

The relative importance of these two costs has been different in different historical periods. In an era of scarce information and poor information circulation, the cost of obtaining target information is far greater than the cost of eliminating information noise. While in

1.Overall comparison

Today, the Internet has been used as the main information search tool. The development of the Internet can be divided into the era of portal sites and the era of search engines. In fact, this development path is closely related to the reduction of user information search costs. In the era of portals, network editors can filter and classify information on the Internet with less human input to help users reduce the cost of information search. The rise of search engines has benefited from the explosion of information on the Internet, making it difficult for manual editors to rely on machines to automatically screen and classify information. However, search engines also have drawbacks. There is information friction and loss when users interact with search engines. This includes two aspects: First, the information loss when users submit query instructions to the search engines is mainly due to the inadequacy of search engines. Or accurately understand the user's intention; the second is the loss of information when search engines submit search results to users, mainly because users need to exclude noise information from the search result information. These two types of information loss increase the cost of information search.

2. Comparison based on different user groups

From the perspective of user groups, portals and search engines each have a dominant user group. Search engines are more suitable for users who already have a certain background knowledge of the target information they are searching for, because they have the knowledge of keywords, they can send appropriate query instructions to the search engines, and they are more capable of excluding noise information in the search results. Therefore, the information loss between human and machine can be reduced more successfully. For example, the success of Baidu's MP3 search is largely due to the service's finding the largest number of "expert" user groups in China-the pop music enthusiast group. The portal is more suitable for non-expert users who lack keyword knowledge, and they trust the result of manual editing-the process of filtering information by others instead of themselves. For example, users prefer to go to the portal to watch the news rather than go to the news search page of the search engine, because they trust human editors to tell them which news is the most important and most noteworthy today, rather than the machine. .

From the perspective of search engine companies, because information search through search engines is subject to the user s existing background knowledge and the ability to extract appropriate keywords, in order to win more users, it is necessary to provide users with more search assistance, That is to help non-expert users become quasi-expert users. Some foreign human-computer interaction experts have proposed the concept of explorer search (exploratory search), and they believe that by improving the presentation of search results, users can complete the search more successfully. For example, automatic clustering of search results can achieve this effect.