Territories and Border Crossings: Information Search and Location in the Online Environment

The established literature on user website behavior leaves gaps by generally making one of two important assumptions. First, users have often been treated as having homogeneous intent. Second, research has focused either on a single site in isolation or on broader user experiences. To address these gaps, this dissertation invokes the metaphor of location and travel to describe users’ actions on the Web. We approach these topics over the course of three discrete studies. In the first study, we use a laboratory-based experiment to look at users’ movements within individual websites to identify the significant properties and qualities of their within-site travel behavior that should be preferred by website owners. In the second study, we use archival data to infer user intent when transiting into a new website location. In the third and final study, we introduce the idea of online borders and, through an online experiment, use them to explain variance in users' recognition of and willingness to attribute credit to websites.