Student searching behavior and the web: use of academic resources and Google

Library Trends, Spring, 2005 by Jillian R. Griffiths, Peter Brophy

ABSTRACT

This article reports results of two user studies of search engine use conducted to evaluate the United Kingdom's national academic sector digital information services and projects. The results presented here focus on student searching behavior and show that commercial Internet search engines dominate students' information-seeking strategy. Forty-five percent of students use Google as their first port of call when locating information, with the university library catalogue used by 10 percent of the sample. Results of students' perceptions of ease of use, success, time taken to search, and reasons for stopping a search are also presented.

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As part of its commitment to developing the use of electronic resources and infrastructures, including the Internet, as an educational resource, the United Kingdom has expended considerable funds to facilitate the convergence of new learning environments with digital library services and to develop a coherent Information Environment (IE) to support higher education (Ingrain & Grout, 2002). (1) The resulting IE is both an enabling infrastructure, designed to facilitate the interoperability of heterogeneous services, and an impressive collection of online resources. While it continues to expand in size, scope, and complexity, formative evaluation has been a key part of the IE. In recent years, a number of government-sponsored projects have sought to investigate and profile the way students use electronic information services within higher and further education. This article focuses on student Web searching behavior and reports on some of the related studies conducted at the Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM) at the Manchester Metropolitan University and at the Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technologies (CSALT) at Lancaster University. The results of these studies are significant not only to the IE but also to other subject portal projects and to online library research in general.

SURVEY OF EXISTING SEARCH ENGINE USE RESEARCH

We begin our analysis with an examination of recent research on search engine use. First we analyze research on general Internet users, and then we look at the work focusing on student users. Search engine usage is difficult to measure because search engines--and the Internet in general--are not controlled environments, such as a library home page or a specific information database. As such, it has been difficult to apply the traditional model of recall and precision used in evaluating information retrieval (IR) systems to Internet search engines (SEs).

A further major limitation to search engine use research is that users are adopting different information-seeking strategies than those used in more traditional contexts (Ford, Wilson, Foster, Ellis, & Spink, 2002;Jansen, Spink, & Saracevic, 2000). Jansen also points out that the behavior of Web searchers follows the principle of least effort (Zipf, 1949). This has also been recorded by Marchionini (1992), who stated that "humans will seek the path of least cognitive resistance" (p. 156), and Griffiths (1996), who found that "increasing the cognitive burden placed on the user ... can affect successful retrieval of information. Where an application required fewer actions from the user, greater success was achieved as there was less possibility for a user to make an error" (p. 203).

An informative review of Web searching studies by Jansen and Pooch (2001) compares the searching characteristics of Web information seekers with those of users of traditional IR systems, but their study separates out Online Public Access Catalogue (OPAC) users from general IR system users. So, for example, they found that OPAC searchers express their information needs in queries of one to two terms, while Web searchers use approximately two terms and IR searchers six to nine terms per query. Searching session length also differed, with Web searchers usually using two queries per session and typically viewing no more than ten documents from the results list, OPAC searchers using two to five queries and viewing fewer than fifty documents, and IR searchers using seven to sixteen queries and viewing ten documents per session. In addition, while 37 percent of IR searchers use Boolean operators, only 8 percent of Web searchers and 1 percent of OPAC searchers use more advanced searches.

Other observations of the average Web searcher (Spink, Wilson, Ellis, & Ford, 1998; Ellis, Ford, & Furner, 1998) point out that ineffective use may be caused by a lack of understanding of how a search engine interprets a query. Few users are aware of whether or not a search service defaults to "and" or "or" and expect a search engine to automatically discriminate between single terms and phrases. Also, devices such as relevance feedback work well if the user ranks ten or more items, when in reality users will only rank one or two items for feedback (Croft, 1995). Koll (1993) found that users provide few clues as to what they want, approaching a search with an attitude of "I'll know it when I see it," which creates difficulties in formulation of a query statement.