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PurposeThe local food tourism in Pakistan is increasing rapidly, and it attracts scholars to determine the factors affecting local food tourists' buying choices. Particularly, the authors aim to investigate the role of food consumption values on predicting domestic tourists' attitude toward local food and its effect on the intention to try local food with the moderating effect of personality traits (neophobia and neophilia).Design/methodology/approachThe authors tested the study model on 250 completed responses from local food tourists. They collected the data from three tourism locations (Islamabad, Rawalpindi and Peshawar) in Pakistan. Their study utilizes the consumption value theory within the limits of Pakistan's local food tourism.FindingsThe empirical findings show that consumption values, such as price, emotion, interaction, epistemic value, location value and variety value, effectively explain the domestic tourists' attitude toward local food. The authors further report that food neophilia strengthens the local tourists' positive reception toward the local food. However, food neophobia weakens the direction between local tourists' attitude toward local food and the intention to try local food.Practical implicationsThis study provides insights pertaining to tourists' local food consumption values (LFCVs) to a local destination owner and marketing manager to strategically work on LFCVs that are crucial for domestic tourists to derive their intention to try local food. Practitioners should work on domestic tourists who possess food neophobia trait and enquire them for their rejection or avoidance of a particular local destination. This will enable practitioners to bring innovation and development in the local destination, which ultimately promote local food tourism.Originality/valueThis study is the first to incorporate the variety and local value in tourists' LFCVs to predict local tourists' attitude toward local food. Additionally, the authors contribute to local food tourism by empirically studying the moderating role of personality traits (food neophilia and food neophobia) to examine the direction between local tourists' attitude and intention to local food.

In this research we investigate the effect of search engine brand on the evaluation of searching performance. Our research is motivated by the large amount of search traffic directed to a handful of Web search engines, even though many have similar interfaces and performance. We conducted a laboratory experiment with 32 participants using a 4 2 factorial design confounded in four blocks to measure the effect of four search engine brands (Google, MSN, Yahoo!, and a locally developed search engine) while controlling for the quality and presentation of search engine results. We found brand indeed played a role in the searching process. Brand effect varied in different domains. Users seemed to place a high degree of trust in major search engine brands; however, they were more engaged in the searching process when using lesser-known search engines. It appears that branding affects overall Web search at four stages: (a) search engine selection, (b) search engine results page evaluation, (c) individual link evaluation, and (d) evaluation of the landing page. We discuss the implications for search engine marketing and the design of empirical studies measuring search engine performance. IntroductionThere has been a rapid growth in the Web search engine market since its inception. Search engines continue to attract a large number of Web searchers and consistently rank as some of the heavily visited sites in the market in terms of the number of visitors (Alexa Internet Inc., 2008). There are numerous search engines on the Web (Wikipedia, 2008); however, only a handful dominates in terms of usage (Sullivan, 2008). From a technological point, this clustering of traffic is interesting because studies report that the performance of most of the major search engines is practically the same (c.f., Eastman & Jansen, 2003). Performance is typically defined as returning useful results and is measured by precision, which is the ratio of relevant documents to the total number of document returned at some point in the results listing. The interfaces of most search engines are also similar, namely, a text box, some verticals (i.e., tabs for searching the Web, Images, Audio, etc.), and a submit button. In studies of search engine interface usability, the results among various search engines have been similar (c.f., Wildemuth & Carter, 2002).Given the similarity in technology and interface design, why do only a small number of search engines dominate Web traffic? Certainly maintaining Web searching infrastructures on a large scale is expensive, but several well-financed companies have been unsuccessful. Do other elements affect the evaluation of a search engine's performance? Seeking the answers to these questions motivate our research.There could be many possible avenues to investigate. In a series of user studies concerning Web searching (Jansen, 2006;Jansen & McNeese, 2005), the participants completed pre-surveys concerning their Web searching habits. One question addressed which search engine the participant used and why. There were ma...

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