EXPLORING AND IDENTIFICATION OF PASSENGERS’ WEB SEARCH GOALS USING “TICKET” RELATED QUERIES IN THE AIRLINE MARKET: A GOOGLE TRENDS STUDY

The implications of information search behavior on the web have become clearer nowthat internet search engines data are publicly available. In this respect, understanding andexploring web search goals of users can lead search engines to provide better-personalizedresults, while enabling marketers to choose the right advertising objectives. It is of greatimportance that people’s time-dependent web search goals of the purchasing of air ticketsare revealed from a collective perspective in the airline market. Thus, this study aims todetermine time-dependent web search goals of passengers for the airline market by examining different word variations in flight ticket queries. Thus, global search query datafrom different periods were obtained using Google Trends (GT). Independent samplest-test, One-Way ANOVA and MANOVA were performed to answer the research questions.According to the results of the research, passengers were mostly interested in using Google for transactional goals. This was followed by “locating” physical evidence in airlineservices. Besides, navigational searches of passengers appeared to differ significantly byhourly periods.