NEW YORK — Bob Dudley remembers when his favorite activity on a sunny weekend afternoon was surfing the World Wide Web. Drifting from one hyperlink to another, he read online diaries, became a fishing rights expert, played search engines against each other to see which came up with the best results.
It was, he says, "like going to a bookstore and browsing through all the stacks — oh, look at this, oh, look at that! I couldn't pull myself away."
This summer, Dudley, a 53-year-old advertising consultant, has been spending weekends outside. The Web still comes in handy for checking stock quotes and news, but in a shift mirrored by many other Internet users, his interest in the Web is no longer driven by eclectic imagination.
When he logs on now, he knows what he wants and he mostly knows where to get it.
While plenty of people do publish their personal musings and pictures of their babies, new data shows that for many people, the Web has become a routine electronic device.
Last year, about 60 percent of Internet users visited more than 20 Web sites in a typical month, according to Jupiter Media Metrix, a research firm that measures traffic online; this year the proportion is close to half. The number of people using search engines as a starting point has also decreased significantly, a reflection of the more direct, predetermined approach to the Web.
People are spending more time online, according to Jupiter; the average user in the United States spent 20.7 hours in July, up 2 hours from last year. But their visits are concentrated in fewer places.
"We always think of the Internet as being very diverse, democratic — that everyone goes to hundreds of sites every week," said Mark Mooradian, a senior analyst at Jupiter. "In truth, that's less and less the case."
"What I worry about is that people are encouraged to drill down into their areas of concern to such a degree that they get closeted in their own reflections of themselves," said Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania. "That can militate against an open society. And surfing was a way out of that."
In a separate survey, conducted by the Pew Internet and American Life Project earlier this year, 29 percent said they were spending more time online, and 17 percent less. The reason most often cited by people who said they were spending more time was that they needed to for school or work. About half of those who said they were spending less time online said simply that it was no longer necessary.
What is lost in this new utilitarian view of the Web, some say, is the experience of serendipity and the delight in finding things that you would not naturally seek out.