Studying and analysing students web search behaviours within three Jordanian universities

Abstract

The World Wide Web has become a phenomenon. The web is a crucial source of information for almost every person. Peoples with different jobs using the internet to meet their professional needs, and the university students constitute a large segment of those people who use the internet frequently to accomplish their information needs. This research has conducted an investigation to determine how Jordanian university students are using the web, what are the characteristics of queries used when searching the internet, what are the top searched queries, …, etc. All these goals are achieved after extracting different queries and information from these web log files and analysing them. Results have showed that students are interested in topics related to entertainment and society more than topics related to their studies. Students submit short queries consisting of 1, 2, or 3 terms with little usage of different query operators. Unsurprisingly, they use Google as the preferred search engine and Arabic as the preferred search language.