My wife is fond of referring to the Internet and search as a 'black hole'. As someone whose living is directly related to the business of search, its a bit unnerving to hear my wife say this. But, its a hard point to argue. When we sit down to research something, it can be a time suck in two ways. 1) It just takes a really long time to find what we want, or 2) we get distracted by other things we come see.

Well, a comScore (http://www.comscore.com/press/release.asp?press=1991) study of Travel related search in the U.K. shows that perhaps things just take a long time.

With business travel, one of my previous employers had a corporate travel agency. I'd call or email what I wanted to do and they made all the arrangements, then I just got all the documents via email or fedex and left. Now, I am pretty familiar with my preferred travel and can quickly make my plans online. So, the Internet actually saves me time.

But, I think about my time with personal travel before the Internet. For instance, when I was in London in 1988 and wanted to go to France for a week, I told a travel agent what I wanted to do and came back to claim my tickets, reservations and maps. It was very easy and done within a day with very little effort on my part.

Now, compare this to the results of the comScore study: 29 days, 12 searches, 22 travel websites and 2.5 visits to the website of the ultimate purchase. We can all do this on our own. But, if we add up all the hours we spend starting from scratch, filling in our ignorance and creating new plans, and multiply that time by the average hourly wage of the searchers, is this more efficient for us? Or, does it just let us be more independent? Do we really get better results? Only the individual traveler can judge this. By the way, who do you call when your plan don't go the way you thought?

As we mature in our use of the Internet, we will each make these decisions. But, just because we can do things for ourselves doesn't mean it is better.