Web search strategies: The influence of Web experience and task type

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.