Searching vs. Surfing

In the article, Searching Versus Surfing: How Different Ways of Acquiring Content Online Affect Cognitive Processing by Kevin Wise, Ph.D. and Hyo Jung Kim, M.A., a study was performed to find out what the differences were between searching the Internet and surfing it. To do this, they assigned some people a task to find a specific item, while the other people were allowed to browse freely. To figure out what the differences were, they measured the heart rates of the individuals before and during the tests. The surfers had a steadier heart rate through the time, while the searchers had a fluctuating rate based on whether or not they found what they were looking for. In addition to measuring the heart rates, the study also tested how well the two groups recognized the images after the test. They found that the searchers recognized the images better than the surfers. These results show that there is definitely a difference between surfing and searching for content. 

The concepts in this article can also be related to travel. For travel purposes, let’s think of searching as knowing exactly where you want to go and just skipping everything between point A and point B and surfing as having a vague idea of where you want to go and stopping all along the way. In this scenario people who go to one place would most likely be more excited to get there and then remember it more than people who were surfing. If you were to ‘surf travel’ then you are less likely to remember every place you saw along the way. In this way, surfing and searching both the web and travel are very similar.