Curtis Poe - Project Management by Dummies:

"In economics, search costs are the costs of acquiring information. Whether you pay for it, research it in books or on the Web or just discover it for yourself, the more time you spend searching for information the less time you have to develop your product. How many times have you had a project blocked while you’re waiting for information?

[...] One fun trick you can use to verify the importance of lowering search costs is to have a developer sit down with someone who is actually going to use the product being developed. [...] I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of developers who’ve sat down with a customer and walked away being able to make a much better product. They went to the source of information and lowered their search costs."