Search (122 results, page 2 of 7)

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Abstract

In information seeking and retrieval research, researchers often collect data about users' behaviors to predict task characteristics and personalize information for users. The reliability of user behavior may be directly influenced by data collection methods. This article reports on a mixed-methods study examining the impact of study setting (laboratory setting vs. remote setting) and task authenticity (authentic task vs. simulated task) on users' online browsing and searching behaviors. Thirty-six undergraduate participants finished one lab session and one remote session in which they completed one authentic and one simulated task. Using log data collected from 144 task sessions, this study demonstrates that the synthetic lab study setting and simulated tasks had significant influences mostly on behaviors related to content pages (e.g., page dwell time, number of pages visited per task). Meanwhile, first-query behaviors were less affected by study settings or task authenticity than whole-session behaviors, indicating the reliability of using first-query behaviors in task prediction. Qualitative interviews reveal why users were influenced. This study addresses methodological limitations in existing research and provides new insights and implications for researchers who collect online user search behavioral data.

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Abstract

Purpose - This paper aims to report findings from an exploratory study investigating the web interactions and technoliteracy of children in the early childhood years. Previous research has studied aspects of older children's technoliteracy and web searching; however, few studies have analyzed web search data from children younger than six years of age. Design/methodology/approach - The study explored the Google web searching and technoliteracy of young children who are enrolled in a "preparatory classroom" or kindergarten (the year before young children begin compulsory schooling in Queensland, Australia). Young children were video- and audio-taped while conducting Google web searches in the classroom. The data were qualitatively analysed to understand the young children's web search behaviour. Findings - The findings show that young children engage in complex web searches, including keyword searching and browsing, query formulation and reformulation, relevance judgments, successive searches, information multitasking and collaborative behaviours. The study results provide significant initial insights into young children's web searching and technoliteracy. Practical implications - The use of web search engines by young children is an important research area with implications for educators and web technologies developers. Originality/value - This is the first study of young children's interaction with a web search engine.

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Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to propose the Collaborative Search System that attempts to achieve collaboration by implicitly identifying and reflecting search behaviour of collaborators in an academic network that is automatically and dynamically formed. By using the constructed Collaborative Hit Matrix (CHM), results are obtained that are based on the search behaviour and earned preferences of specialist communities of researchers, which are relevant to the user's need and reduce the time spent on bad links. Design/methodology/approach - By using the Digital Bibliography Library Project (DBLP), the research communities are formed implicitly and dynamically based on the users' research presence in the search environment and in the publication scenario, which is also used to assign users' roles and establish links between the users. The CHM, to store the hit count and hit list of page results for queries, is also constructed and updated after every search session to enhance the collaborative search among the researchers. Findings - The implicit researchers community formation, the assignment and dynamic updating of roles of the researchers based on research, search presence and search behaviour on the web as well as the usage of these roles during Collaborative Web Search have highly improved the relevancy of results. The CHM that holds the collaborative responses provided by the researchers on the search query results to support searching distinguishes this system from others. Thus the proposed system considerably improves the relevancy and reduces the time spent on bad links, thus improving recall and precision. Originality/value - The research findings illustrate the better performance of the system, by connecting researchers working in the same field and allowing them to help each other in a web search environment.

Date

20. 1.2015 18:30:22

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Date

25.12.1998 19:22:31

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Abstract

This article reviews studies, conducted between 1995 and 2000, on Web search behavior. These studies reported on children as well as on adults. Most of the studies on children described their interaction with the Web. Research on adult searchers focused on describing search patterns, and many studies investigated effects of selected factors on search behavior, including information organization and presentation, type of search task, Web experience, cognitive abilities, and affective states. What distinguishes the research on adult searchers is the use of multiple data-gathering methods. The research on Web search behavior reflects researchers' commitment to examine users in their information environment and exhibits rigor in design and data analysis. However, many studies lack external validity. Implications of this body of research are discussed.

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Abstract

Previous studies have examined various aspects of user behavior on the Web, including general information-seeking patterns, search engine use, and revisitation habits. Little research has been conducted to study how users navigate and interact with their Web browser across different information-seeking tasks. We have conducted a field study of 21 participants, in which we logged detailed Web usage and asked participants to provide task categorizations of their Web usage based on the following categories: Fact Finding, Information Gathering, Browsing, and Transactions. We used implicit measures logged during each task session to provide usage measures such as dwell time, number of pages viewed, and the use of specific browser navigation mechanisms. We also report on differences in how participants interacted with their Web browser across the range of information-seeking tasks. Within each type of task, we found several distinguishing characteristics. In particular, Information Gathering tasks were the most complex; participants spent more time completing this task, viewed more pages, and used the Web browser functions most heavily during this task. The results of this analysis have been used to provide implications for future support of information seeking on the Web as well as direction for future research in this area.

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Abstract

Despite a number of studies looking at Web experience and Web searching tactics and behaviours, the specific relationships between experience and cognitive search strategies have not been widely researched. This study investigates how the cognitive search strategies of 80 participants might vary with Web experience as they engaged in two researcher-defined tasks and two participant-defined information seeking tasks. Each of the two researcher-defined tasks and participant-defined tasks included a directed search task and a general-purpose browsing task. While there were almost no significant performance differences between experience levels on any of the four tasks, there were significant differences in the use of cognitive search strategies. Participants with higher levels of Web experience were more likely to use "Parallel player", "Parallel hub-and-spoke", "Known address search domain" and "Known address" strategies, whereas participants with lower levels of Web experience were more likely to use "Virtual tourist", "Link-dependent", "To-the-point", "Sequential player", "Search engine narrowing", and "Broad first" strategies. The patterns of use and differences between researcher-defined and participant-defined tasks and between directed search tasks and general-purpose browsing tasks are also discussed, although the distribution of search strategies by Web experience were not statistically significant for each individual task.

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Abstract

Previous studies have shown that users' cognitive styles play an important role during web searching. However, only a limited number of studies have showed the relationship between cognitive styles and web search behavior. Most importantly, it is not clear which components of web search behavior are influenced by cognitive styles. This article examines the relationships between users' cognitive styles and their web searching and develops a model that portrays the relationship. The study uses qualitative and quantitative analyses based on data gathered from 50 participants. A questionnaire was utilized to collect participants' demographic information, and Riding's (1991) Cognitive Styles Analysis (CSA) test to assess their cognitive styles. Results show that users' cognitive styles influenced their information-searching strategies, query reformulation behavior, web navigational styles, and information-processing approaches. The user model developed in this study depicts the fundamental relationships between users' web search behavior and their cognitive styles. Modeling web search behavior with a greater understanding of users' cognitive styles can help information science researchers and information systems designers to bridge the semantic gap between the user and the systems. Implications of the research for theory and practice, and future work, are discussed.

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Abstract

Users' individual differences and tasks are important factors that influence the use of information systems. Two independent investigations were conducted to study the impact of differences in users' cognition and search tasks on Web search activities and outcomes. Strong task effects were found on search activities and outcomes, whereas interactions between cognitive and task variables were found on search activities only. These results imply that the flexibility of the Web and Web search engines allows different users to complete different search tasks successfully. However, the search techniques used and the efficiency of the searches appear to depend on how well the individual searcher fits with the specific task

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Abstract

The study investigated how users' emotion control and search tasks interact and influence the Web search behavior and performance among experienced Web users. Sixty-seven undergraduate students with substantial Web experience participated in the study. Effects of emotion control and tasks were found significant on the search behavior but not on the search performance. The interaction effect between emotion control and tasks on the search behavior was also significant: effects of users' emotion control on the search behavior varied depending on search tasks. Profile analyses of search behaviors identified and contrasted the most commonly occurring profiles of search activities in different search tasks. Suggestions were made to improve information literacy programs, and implications for future research were discussed.

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Abstract

Transaction logs from four different Web-based information retrieval environments (bibliographic databank, OPAC, search engine, specialized search system) were analyzed for empirical regularities in search characteristics to determine whether users engage in different behaviors in different Web-based search environments. Descriptive statistics and relative frequency distributions related to term usage, query formulation, and session duration were tabulated. The analysis revealed that there are differences in these characteristics. Users were more likely to engage in extensive searching using the OPAC and specialized search system. Surprisingly, the bibliographic databank search environment resulted in the most parsimonious searching, more similar to a general search engine. Although on the surface Web-based search facilities may appear similar, users do engage in different search behaviors.

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Abstract

This article explores the effects of undergraduate students' mental models of the Web on their online searching behavior. Forty-four undergraduate students, mainly freshmen and sophomores, participated in the study. Subjects' mental models of the Web were treated as equally good styles and operationalized as drawings of their perceptions about the Web. Four types of mental models of the Web were identified based on the drawings and the associated descriptions: technical view, functional view, process view, and connection view. In the study, subjects were required to finish two search tasks. Searching behavior was measured from four aspects: navigation and performance, subjects' feelings about tasks and their own performances, query construction, and search patterns. The four mental model groups showed different navigation and querying behaviors, but the differences were not significant. Subjects' satisfaction with their own performances was found to be significantly correlated with the time to complete the task. The results also showed that the familiarity of the task to subjects had a major effect on their ways to start interaction, query construction, and search patterns.

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Abstract

Subject content analysis of Web query terms is essential to understand Web searching interests. Such analysis includes exploring search topics and observing changes in their frequency distributions with time. To provide a basis for in-depth analysis of users' search interests on a larger scale, this article presents a query categorization approach to automatically classifying Web query terms into broad subject categories. Because a query is short in length and simple in structure, its intended subject(s) of search is difficult to judge. Our approach, therefore, combines the search processes of real-world search engines to obtain highly ranked Web documents based on each unknown query term. These documents are used to extract cooccurring terms and to create a feature set. An effective ranking function has also been developed to find the most appropriate categories. Three search engine logs in Taiwan were collected and tested. They contained over 5 million queries from different periods of time. The achieved performance is quite encouraging compared with that of human categorization. The experimental results demonstrate that the approach is efficient in dealing with large numbers of queries and adaptable to the dynamic Web environment. Through good integration of human and machine efforts, the frequency distributions of subject categories in response to changes in users' search interests can be systematically observed in real time. The approach has also shown potential for use in various information retrieval applications, and provides a basis for further Web searching studies.

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Abstract

Web queries in question format are becoming a common element of a user's interaction with Web search engines. Web search services such as Ask Jeeves - a publicly accessible question and answer (Q&A) search engine - request users to enter question format queries. This paper provides results from a study examining queries in question format submitted to two different Web search engines - Ask Jeeves that explicitly encourages queries in question format and the Excite search service that does not explicitly encourage queries in question format. We identify the characteristics of queries in question format in two different data sets: (1) 30,000 Ask Jeeves queries and 15,575 Excite queries, including the nature, length, and structure of queries in question format. Findings include: (1) 50% of Ask Jeeves queries and less than 1% of Excite were in question format, (2) most users entered only one query in question format with little query reformulation, (3) limited range of formats for queries in question format - mainly "where", "what", or "how" questions, (4) most common question query format was "Where can I find ..." for general information on a topic, and (5) non-question queries may be in request format. Overall, four types of user Web queries were identified: keyword, Boolean, question, and request. These findings provide an initial mapping of the structure and content of queries in question and request format. Implications for Web search services are discussed.

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Abstract

Purpose - This paper aims to report a number of factors that are perceived by web users as influential elements in their search procedure. The paper introduces a new conceptual measure called "web search efficacy" (hereafter WSE) to evaluate the performance of searches mainly based on users' perceptions. Design/methodology/approach - A rich dataset of a wider study was inductively re-explored to identify different categories that are perceived influential by web users on the final outcome of their searches. A selective review of the literature was carried out to discover to what extent previous research supports the findings of the current study. Findings - The analysis of the dataset led to the identification of five categories of influential factors. Within each group different factors have been recognized. Accordingly, the concept of WSE has been introduced. The five "Ss" which determine WSE are searcher's performance, search tool's performance, search strategy, search topic, and search situation. Research limitations/implications - The research body is scattered in different areas and it is difficult to carry out a comprehensive review. The WSE table, which is derived from the empirical data and was supported by previous research, can be employed for further research in various groups of web users. Originality/value - The paper contributes to the area of information seeking on the web by providing researchers with a new conceptual framework to evaluate the efficiency of each search session and identify the underlying factors on the final outcome of web searching.

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Abstract

The rapid development of Web sites providing extensive coverage of a topic, coupled with the development of powerful search engines (designed to help users find such Web sites), suggests that users can easily find comprehensive information about a topic. In domains such as consumer healthcare, finding comprehensive information about a topic is critical as it can improve a patient's judgment in making healthcare decisions, and can encourage higher compliance with treatment. However, recent studies show that despite using powerful search engines, many healthcare information seekers have difficulty finding comprehensive information even for narrow healthcare topics because the relevant information is scattered across many Web sites. To date, no studies have analyzed how facts related to a search topic are distributed across relevant Web pages and Web sites. In this study, the distribution of facts related to five common healthcare topics across high-quality sites is analyzed, and the reasons underlying those distributions are explored. The analysis revealed the existence of few pages that had many facts, many pages that had few facts, and no single page or site that provided all the facts. While such a distribution conforms to other information-related phenomena, a deeper analysis revealed that the distributions were caused by a trade-off between depth and breadth, leading to the existence of general, specialized, and sparse pages. Furthermore, the results helped to make explicit the knowledge needed by searchers to find comprehensive healthcare information, and suggested the motivation to explore distribution-conscious approaches for the development of future search systems, search interfaces, Web page designs, and training.