Search results

The World Wide Web is like a huge country, dotted with hundreds of thousands of sites, and each site contains some information. Despite the size of this country, transportation from any site to another requires only a mouse click and under the right conditions takes just a few moments.

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.

This chapter presents findings from a qualitative study focused on the strategies that two marginalized seventh graders used as they completed an Internet inquiry project about survival.

The participants spent time over a four-week period in three phases – selecting a topic, locating information, and presenting information. Participants completed journals and participated in interviews. The participants’ online searches and how they organized their presentations were recorded. The researcher took field notes. These four data sources were used to determine subcategories in each phase to document the strategies they employed as they completed the project.

Participants used phrases and questions as they decided on key words to locate information. The majority of the sites they visited ended in the .com domain. They used different web browsers and spent varied amounts of time reading websites once they decided on key words and selected sites. Each participant approached the project uniquely and met the requirements to complete it.

This study suggests that students in self-contained resource classes engage with online content in sophisticated ways but that they still need support from teachers to optimize their learning.

Studies like this add to a body of research offering thick descriptions of teachers and students work together. In addition, this chapter derives value from the fact that it was conducted by a classroom teacher and therefore offers a unique perspective on the classroom as a learning environment as well as a site of inquiry.

This study seeks to focus on the following: discovering consumer preferences regarding package tours to China; revealing differences among consumers' cognition related to these package tours, travel advertisements on web sites and search engine results; identifying the similarities among travel agency web sites; and establishing a consumer cognitive structure to assist marketers in designing written content for display in search engine results.

The study adopted means‐end chain theory as a theoretical basis and used the written content of tourism web sites displayed in search engine results as an empirical object. By comparing the contents of tourism web sites and the search engine results, the researchers could analyse and compare similarities and differences among web site content, search results and consumer cognition.

Using the utility score of each attribute level to calculate the total utility can uncover the customers' preferred attribute level portfolio. The calculation results identified the most preferred tour package. The study found that the greater the variety of package tours to China provided by the web sites of a particular travel agent, the higher the possibility of that agent providing discount incentives. Furthermore, the text content of each web site provides more attribute information regarding package tours and less information about the consequences of travelling and value satisfaction.

This is one of the first studies to provide a methodology integrating conjoint analysis and the means‐end chain approach. Understanding the written content of web sites preferred by Chinese people can help marketers and web site designers design web sites attractive to this market.

How easy are business Web sites for potential customers to find? This paper reports on a survey of 60,087 Web sites from 42 of the major general and commercial domains around the world to extract statistics about their design and rate of search engine registration. Search engines are used by the majority of Web surfers to find information on the Web. However, 23 per cent of business Web sites in the survey were not registered at all in the five major search engines tested and 82 per cent were not registered in at least one, missing a sizeable potential audience. There are some simple steps that should also be taken to help a Web site to be indexed properly in search engines, primarily the use of HTML META tags for indexing, but only about a third of the site home pages in the survey used them. Wide national variations were found for both indexing and META tag inclusion.

Web usage statistics are often used as a tool for assessing a Web site, despite some of their drawbacks. This paper attempts to evaluate a government publications library Web site by studying its usage statistics. It examines organization, including access, searchability, and structure, of electronic government information in subject directory format. This study reveals that a subject directory Web site is an important tool for distributing electronic government information, but it requires continuous development. The usage statistics are useful in monitoring search engine ranking, improving display, structure, and searchability.

The existence and continued growth of the invisible web creates a major challenge for search engines that are attempting to organize all of the material on the web into a form that is easily retrieved by all users. The purpose of this paper is to identify the challenges and problems underlying existing work in this area.

A discussion based on a short survey of prior work, including automated discovery of invisible web site search interfaces, automated classification of invisible web sites, label assignment and form filling, information extraction from the resulting pages, learning the query language of the search interface, building content summary for an invisible web site, selecting proper databases, integrating invisible web‐search interfaces, and accessing the performance of an invisible web site.

Existing technologies and tools for indexing the invisible web follow one of two strategies: indexing the web site interface or examining a portion of the contents of an invisible web site and indexing the results.

The paper is of value to those involved with information management.

This paper aims to discuss and test the claim that user‐based tagging allows for access to a wider variety of viewpoints than is found using other forms of online searching.

A general overview of the nature of weblogs and user‐based tagging is given, along with other relevant concepts. A case is then analyzed where viewpoints towards a specific issue are searched for using both tag searching (Technorati) and general search engine searching (Google and Google Blog Search).

The claim to greater accessibility through user‐based tagging is not overtly supported with these experiments. Further results for both general and tag‐specific searching goes against some common assumptions about the types of content found on weblogs as opposed to more general web sites.

User‐based tagging is still not widespread enough to give conclusive data for analysis. As this changes, further research in this area, using a variety of search subjects, is warranted.

Although proponents of user‐based tagging attribute many qualities to the practice, these qualities have not been properly documented or demonstrated. This paper partially rectifies this gap by testing one of the claims made, that of accessibility to alternate views, thus adding to the discussion on tagging for both researchers and other interested parties.

The main objective of this paper is to compare consumers' online shopping behavior across three types of services (i.e. search, experience, and credence). Reviewing the marketing and psychology literatures, this study aims to propose that consumers' emotions (pleasure, arousal, and dominance) influence their perception of site atmospheric cues (site informativeness, effectiveness, and entertainment), which, in turn, impact consumers' site attitudes, site involvement, and purchase intention. It also aims to test the proposed model for three major types of services (i.e. search, experience, and credence) and to compare the path coefficients of all the relationships in the model across the three groups.

Lab experiments were conducted for data collection and structural equation modeling was utilized for multi‐group analysis.

The results supported the proposed model and revealed several non‐invariant structural paths across the three groups.

The student sample may not represent the general population.

Search‐, experience‐, and credence‐based services should attempt to evoke the most desired consumer emotional types (pleasure, arousal, and dominance).

Unlike many other studies in services marketing, this paper tests the proposed model across different service types to increase the generalizability of the results.