Search results

Purpose: Many Internet users search for health information but they struggle with assessing the quality of the information they find. By drawing on a multi-modal approach to data collection, this study aims to understand further the nuanced cognitive processes that people utilize as they acquire and evaluate online health information.

Design: We used a mixed-methods approach that includes surveys, interviews, and observations of 76 diverse adults of all ages in the Chicago area completing various health information-seeking tasks.

Findings: Most participants begin their information-seeking process on search engines. We identified the most popular credibility-assessment strategies used on the search engine results’ pages (SERP) as well as on websites. We also explored how the process of executing such strategies reveals greater and lesser savvy among users.

Research Limitations: While the sample size and methods limit its generalizability, this study included a larger and more diverse group of participants than most observational work, which results in data about a wider range of behaviors than is typical of such research.

Social Implications: Our findings showed that most of our participants could use additional education regarding credibility assessment of online health information. Additionally, since a great deal of credibility assessment occurs on SERP, search companies bear a particular responsibility for ensuring the quality of the information their results highlight.

How do you efficiently design a global yet local user experience for Web sites? Arguably, the user-centered design approach has been one of the best methods in designing a successful user experience for Web services in the initial market, but why isn’t this process applied to international markets? This chapter makes a case for applying a user-centered design process to the international expansion of Web sites and discusses issues impacting the creation of a successful user experience for local audiences. Although this chapter primarily focuses on designing large scale Web services, many of the principles can be applied to any sites that undergo internationalization.

The objective of this chapter is to establish the positioning on Booking.com of hotels located in the cities of Tehran, Kashan, Abyaneh, Isfahan, Yazd, Persepolis, and Shiraz, the main tourism destinations in the Islamic Republic of Iran. The methodology is quantitative, consisting of the development of a “Spyder” that allows content to be identified and timely information to be extracted from the web. The data obtained allow to establish the average rating by the evaluation categories stated by the platform, while contributing to determining the strengths and weaknesses that the establishments present. These relevant data can thus contribute to the improvement of the services and the destination in general.

This chapter analyzes data from a five-year case study of a secondary school undergoing turnaround, supported by a federal School Improvement Grant. The findings explore how neoliberal policies perpetuate structural inequities in the day-to-day activities of schools by describing how district choice and accountability policies marginalize students of color in low socioeconomic positions. Findings explore the challenges faced by school leaders in a neoliberal policy context and highlight the importance of policy context in a successful improvement effort. The complex web of neoliberal polices of choice and accountability led to lower enrollment, which decreased the school's base funding and led to a greater proportion of students with skill gaps, significant socioemotional needs and students in need of special education services. For school improvement to be successful and to close the opportunity gap, leaders must dismantle and disrupt racist systems and structures bolstered by neoliberal policies.

This chapter provides a brief overview of the contents of this report and evaluates its contribution to the literature. Section 9.2 briefly summarises the motivation behind the study and the scope of the research. Section 9.3 briefly summarises the data, methodology and results. Section 9.4 outlines policy recommendations. Section 9.5 describes the limitations of this study. The last section suggests possible directions for future research that arise from the issues dealt with in this study.

Online shopping cart abandonment presents a major problem for online fashion apparel retailers today. This exploratory research aims to validate scales that measure antecedents of online shopping cart abandonment (OSCA) and examine how these reasons contribute to OSCA behaviour. The findings indicated that the eight different reasons (financial reasons, organisational tool, time pressure, intangibility, privacy issues, aesthetic design, social influences and entertainment factors) that drive OSCA are distinct and account for unique variance in the model, validating the measures. Also, the findings revealed that financial reasons and using the cart as an organisational tool are the top two reasons why consumers abandon their carts. This study provides researchers with a better theoretical understanding of the reasons why consumers abandon their online shopping carts. It validates the various reasons why consumers abandon their shopping carts and provides valuable managerial insights on how online marketers may enhance the translation of online browsing behaviour into actual purchases.

This chapter examines the implications of blockchain ventures for international business. The author highlights the advantages blockchain technologies can create for firms seeking to access international markets for investors, customers, employees, and suppliers. Overall, the international character of initial coin offerings and their business models suggest several advantages over traditional internationalization methods.

This chapter takes a closer look at how social networks can affect the early development of new ventures. The dynamic role of social networks is discussed and exemplified by two longitudinal cases that illustrate the radically different ways in which social networks can influence venture development. These differences relate to social or individual ownership of the innovation process, to risks or opportunities as the focus of attention, and to the creative relationship between networking and financial bootstrapping techniques.

Purpose — To provide an overview of recent research that examined how search engine users evaluate and select Web search results and how alternative search engine interfaces can support Web users' credibility assessment of Web search results.

Design/methodology/approach — As theoretical background, Information Foraging Theory (Pirolli, 2007; Pirolli & Card, 1999) from cognitive science and Prominence-Interpretation-Theory (Fogg, 2003) from communication and persuasion research are presented. Furthermore, a range of recent empirical research that investigated the effects of alternative SERP layouts on searchers' information quality or credibility assessments of search results are reviewed and approaches that aim at automatically classifying search results according to specific genre categories are reported.

Findings — The chapter reports on findings that Web users often rely heavily on the ranking provided by the search engines without paying much attention to the reliability or trustworthiness of the Web pages. Furthermore, the chapter outlines how alternative search engine interfaces that display search results in a format different from a list and/or provide prominent quality-related cues in the SERPs can foster searchers' credibility evaluations.

Research limitations/implications — The reported empirical studies, search engine interfaces, and Web page classification systems are not an exhaustive list.

Originality/value — The chapter provides insights for researchers, search engine developers, educators, and students on how the development and use of alternative search engine interfaces might affect Web users' search and evaluation strategies during Web search as well as their search outcomes in terms of retrieving high-quality, credible information.