How are online search engines and social media informing both consumers and marketers, as searches are made for product information?

One type of deliberate search involves searching on the Internet for information. What's the most common way for us to conduct information search today? Google it, of course! Although there are other search engines out there, such as Bing, Yahoo!, or even YouTube, Google's software that examines the Web for matches to terms like "home theatre system" or "tattoo removal services" is so dominant-with 96 percent of the world's mobile search market-that the name has become a verb. However, even a giant like Google can't rest on its laurels, because changes in how we search will probably reduce our reliance on search engines. Increasingly, consumers bypass Google as they go directly on their smartphones or tablets to apps like Yelp to read and write product reviews. However, as anyone who's ever Googled knows, the Web delivers enormous amounts of product and retailer information in seconds. The biggest problem Web surfers face these days is to narrow down their choices, not to beef them up. In cyberspace, simplification is key. Still, the sad reality is that in many cases we simply don't search as much as we might. If we Google a term, most of us are only likely to look at the first few results at the top of the list. Indeed, that's one reason why search engine optimization (SEO) is so important today. This term refers to the procedures companies use to design the content of websites and posts to maximize the likelihood that their content will show up when someone searches for a relevant term.
Not surprisingly, social media platforms also play a major role in the search process.
Often a next step is to get more information on other social media platforms, such as blogs, YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook. The goal here is not to collect more technical or performance information, but to get other people's opinions about options in the product category-and to eliminate some brands from consideration. What's more, after they buy a brand, about three-quarters of shoppers who use social media in the process choose to follow it on the company's Facebook page so that they can continue to engage with it in the future.