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Search habits of the computer literate

Published: 10 September 2007 Publication History

Abstract

The World Wide Web is only feasible as a practical proposition because of the existence of hypermedia search engines. These search engines face a monumental challenge. They are routinely confronted with searching behaviour best characterised as unsophisticated and impatient. One popular explanation for poor querying technique is lack of computer literacy. Individuals who work closely with Information Technology are frequently exposed to retrieval engines, giving them the opportunity to develop successful searching strategies. In the following paper, we examine this assumption - is there really a correlation between computer literacy and searching skill.

References

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Brin, S., Page, L. (1998) 'The Anatomy of a Large-scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine'. Proc. of the 7th int. conf. on WWW 7, Elsevier, 107--117.
[2]
Broder, A. (2002) 'A taxonomy of web search'. SIGIR Forum, 36 (2), 3--10.
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Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Saracevic, T. (1998) 'Failure analysis in query construction: data and analysis from a large sample of Web queries'. Proc. of the 3rd ACM Conf. on Digital Libraries. ACM Press, 289--290.
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Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Saracevic, T. (2000) 'Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web'. Inf. Process. Manage. 36, (2), 207--227.
[5]
Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Saracevic, T. (2000) 'Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web'. Inf. Process. Manage. 36, (2), 207--227.
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Silverstein, C., Marais, H., Henzinger, M. et al. (1999) 'Analysis of a very large web search engine query log'. SIGIR Forum, 33 (1), 6--12.
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Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, B. J., Saracevic, T. (2001) 'Searching the web: The public and their queries'. J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci., 53 (2), 226--234.
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Spink, A., Jansen, B. J., Wolfram, D., Saracevic, T. (2002) 'From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web Search Changes'. Computer, 35 (3),107--109.
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Sullivan, D. (2006) A. comScore Media Metrix Search Engine Ratings http://searchenginewatch.com/ {Accessed 3 November 2006}

Cited By

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  • (2021)Literature Search Habits of MIS Academics: Empirical Evidence on the Discovery of Impactful ResearchOrganizing in a Digitized World10.1007/978-3-030-86858-1_16(263-277)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2021
  • (2012)Query classification and study of university students' search trendsProgram10.1108/0033033121122185546:2(220-241)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2012

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  1. Search habits of the computer literate

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    HT '07: Proceedings of the eighteenth conference on Hypertext and hypermedia
    September 2007
    240 pages
    ISBN:9781595938206
    DOI:10.1145/1286240
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 10 September 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. query
    2. search behaviour
    3. transaction log analysis
    4. users

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    HT07
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    HT07: 18th Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
    September 10 - 12, 2007
    Manchester, UK

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 378 of 1,158 submissions, 33%

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    View all
    • (2021)Literature Search Habits of MIS Academics: Empirical Evidence on the Discovery of Impactful ResearchOrganizing in a Digitized World10.1007/978-3-030-86858-1_16(263-277)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2021
    • (2012)Query classification and study of university students' search trendsProgram10.1108/0033033121122185546:2(220-241)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2012

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