LANGUAGE REPRESENTATION IN SEARCH ENGINES OF US STATE TOURISM WEBSITES.

Search engines serve as an important channel for tourism destinations to communicate with prospective visitors. This study assessed the language representation of the search results for the 50 state tourism offices in the United States by three major search engines (e.g., Google, Ask, and Yahoo!). The findings indicate that Google and Ask were similar to each other, while both were different from Yahoo! This study provides useful insights for developing more effective search engine marketing strategies for marketing destinations online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]