Your comments are also inline with those from Ross McDonald from Google that online shopping research does start in November.

One of the interesting things with so much comparative shopping choice and research online is that, by the diverse nature of human cognitive processing no one really knows exactly what people think when searching online, and the long tail effect of search shows this to be true when one looks at the search key phrases used in arriving at a website as there are so many different results. Each person based on their model of the world processes thoughts differently. This leaves me to wonder if statistical modeling falls short in researching this kind of data.
This also leads me to the point that there is the debate about the failure of online retailing taking off in Australia, yet it has taken off but in a different way. Let’s look at the situation: A lot of retailers that don’t yet sell online advertise and promote online. Top brands like Target have large volumes of search to their brochure ware site and brochure promotion portals such as Catalogue Central and Lasoo are doing a fantastic job in acting as intermediary for retailers to those browsing online. This is part of the multi channel online retailing strategy that has evolved. Most people think that online retailing is all about a shopping cart and gateway checkout yet there is so much more. People are browsing the World Wide Web and interrogating websites to make informed decisions before walking into a store, and this is the exact thing that is so hard to measure which leads traditional retailers to often give the channel less credit than is due.