User-Generated Content and Online Product Search - The Case of the Indian Automobile Industry

The individual's online search is done privately and is considered an accurate measure of purchase intention. Online product information influences purchases and can be expected to influence purchase intention. Using Google's volume of online search trends and 23,000 online automobile reviews scraped from a popular Indian online forum, the relationship between product reviews and online product information search is examined. The reviews are divided into three groups based on the numerical rating associated with each review. Latent Dirichlet Allocation is used in each group to extract discussion topics from the review text. The study shows that online review valence significantly impacts online search volume. Further, while the topics of discussion across the 3 rating groups overlap, their impact on online search volume is different. The study demonstrates the need to look at rating information more closely and the influence of online UGC on online information search.