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How do Consumers Form Online Search Queries? The Importance of Activation Probabilities between Queries and Results

We explore how consumers form online search queries, and in particular the link between consumers’ information needs and their search queries. Our goal is to provide a framework for the development of search models that can infer consumers’ information needs from their queries. The semantic relationships between queries and results differentiate query formation from traditional, discrete-choice based search. Accordingly, our specific research questions are as follows: (i) Are consumers able to leverage semantic relationships between queries and results when forming online search queries? (ii) How should researchers represent these semantic relationships? (iii) What are consumers’ beliefs on these semantic relationships? Using an experiment in which information needs are manipulated exogenously, we find that consumers have the ability to formulate queries that leverage semantic relationships. Consequently, models of search query formation should capture consumers’ beliefs on a set of semantic relationships, which capture the probability that any query will activate any set of words. Fortunately, we show that these semantic relationships may be approximated parsimoniously by functions of asymmetric activation probabilities at the word level. We find that consumers’ beliefs are biased upwards, and that they are not asymmetric enough.