Heuristic and Systematic Use of Search Engines

It is becoming increasingly important to understand in greater detail how people process information and make decisions while searching on the World Wide Web. With the distinction between systematic and heuristic processing, dual-process theories and decision theory provide a useful framework for analyzing this decision-making. A laboratory quasi-experiment was conducted, combining a client-oriented Web content analysis, think aloud technique, and an online questionnaire. From the data obtained, two different search sequence levels were created and analyzed. The results show that within these sequences, different degrees of heuristic and systematic processing occurred, depending on the situational demands as well as the Web experience and the domain specific involvement of the user. doi:10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00350.x