Search results

A method for improving the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine by employing a website directory, e.g., Yahoo! Japan directory or Google directory, as a concept dictionary is proposed. A user can examine the results of a search engine from the top rank as usual except that he/she is assisted by a suggestion about which webpages are worthy of examination. To make a suggestion the conceptual closeness of an unexamined webpage to a query or to each of the webpages that a user has been interested in is calculated via a website directory. The proposed method was evaluated on the search results of Japanese Excite.

Web content has been widely used for recommending personal webpages. Despite its popularity, the content‐based approach regards a webpage simply as a piece of text, thereby often resulting in less authoritative recommendations of webpages. This paper aims to propose novel approaches that utilise other sources of information pertaining to webpages to facilitate the automatic construction of an authoritative web recommender system.

In this research, four approaches that exploit hyperlink structure, web content and web‐usage logs for making recommendations are proposed. The proposed approaches have been implemented as a prototype system, called the authoritative web recommender (AWR) system. An evaluation using the web‐usage logs and the corresponding pages of a university web site was performed.

The results from the evaluations using empirical data demonstrate that the four proposed approaches outperform the traditional content‐only approach.

This paper describes a novel way to combine information retrieval, usage mining and hyperlink structure analysis techniques to find relevant and authoritative webpages for recommendation.

Little research has been done to understand how individual elements (e.g. advertisements) within a webpage are processed and evaluated when visual complexity is increased. Thus, this study aimed to investigate how consumers allocate attention and evaluate products and advertisements on complex webpages when they are casually browsing.

This study conducted two experiments to test the causal effects of different degrees of visual complexity on consumer responses to products and advertisements. An eye-tracking experiment (n = 90) and a follow-up online experiment (n = 121) were conducted using undergraduate students as participants.

Participants formed a global impression from the overall webpage complexity, which spilled over to evaluation of individual elements on the webpage (e.g. product, advertisement). The inverted U-shaped relationships (vs. linear negative relationships) between webpage visual complexity and attitude toward the webpage, products, and advertisements were observed. The focal product was given a consistent level of attention regardless of the complexity level.

This study provides implications for website organization and design to maximize positive consumer experiences and marketing effectiveness. The findings provide implications for retailers and advertisement buyers.

This study expanded the knowledge by examining the interplay between individual elements of webpages and the whole webpage complexity when consumers browse visually complex webpages. It is a novel finding that the overall webpage complexity effect spills over to locally attended products or advertisements.

This study aims to examine the trustworthiness of internet-based quality signals (specifically webpages and before-sale services) from the perspective of interactivity by evaluating the associations between on-line signals of product quality and the off-line perceived quality of actual products.

Empirical data are collected from 261 Chinese female university students. Partial least squares structural equation modelling is used to test the conceptual model.

Both webpages and before-sale services are positively associated with off-line perceived quality, but only the quality of before-sale service has a direct association with customer satisfaction. Webpages and before-sale services are both trustworthy signals for indicating the quality of physical products; however, these signals provide different levels of trustworthiness.

The interactivity perspective supplements information-economics theory in examining the trustworthiness of internet-based signals. A signal is a trustworthy indicator only if customers perceive a close relationship between the quality of the signal and the actual product quality.

On-line sellers should improve the reciprocity and controllability of communications from a buyer’s perspective and should pay more attention to the strategic role of on-line communication for improving customer service.

Researchers have evaluated the trustworthiness of on-line quality signals from an information-economics perspective. This study extends these previous studies by addressing the perspective of interactivity. Two types of product-quality signals, including webpages and before-sale services, are assessed in terms of their trustworthiness by examining how these signals relate to off-line perceived quality and customer satisfaction.

The purpose of this paper is to describe the development of an algorithm for realizing web crawlers that automatically collect dynamically generated webpages from the deep web.

This study proposes and develops an algorithm to collect web information as if the web crawler gathers static webpages by managing script commands as links. The proposed web crawler actually experiments with the algorithm by collecting deep webpages.

Among the findings of this study is that if the actual crawling process provides search results as script pages, the outcome only collects the first page. However, the proposed algorithm can collect deep webpages in this case.

To use a script as a link, a human must first analyze the web document. This study uses the web browser object provided by Microsoft Visual Studio as a script launcher, so it cannot collect deep webpages if the web browser object cannot launch the script, or if the web document contains script errors.

The research results show deep webs are estimated to have 450 to 550 times more information than surface webpages, and it is difficult to collect web documents. However, this algorithm helps to enable deep web collection through script runs.

This study presents a new method to be utilized with script links instead of adopting previous keywords. The proposed algorithm is available as an ordinary URL. From the conducted experiment, analysis of scripts on individual websites is needed to employ them as links.

This study aims to investigate consumer knowledge of environmentally sustainable apparel (ESA) and examine the impact of communication on consumer knowledge of ESA.

This study employed a quantitative survey focused on Millennial and Generation Z consumers. Two communication methods, hangtags and product webpages, were involved. First, two instruments were established to measure consumers’ objective and subjective knowledge of ESA. Second, two questionnaires were developed to collect participants’ knowledge before and after reading hangtags or product webpages.

There were 385 useable responses. It was found that participants’ knowledge about waste and cotton production’s water issues was less than their knowledge of other subjects and did not increase after reading the related information on hangtags or webpages. Participants’ subjective knowledge was significantly higher than their objective knowledge after communication. The positive effects of communicating with consumers via hangtags and webpages on consumers’ subjective knowledge were confirmed. Additionally, the ESA information provided via hangtags was more effective than webpages in improving consumers’ objective knowledge.

This study makes up for the deficiency in the literature. It provides in-depth insights on consumers’ knowledge of ESA by investigating consumer knowledge before and after communication based on consumer knowledge structure. The textile and apparel industry can use this study’s findings to improve communication with consumers and aid in sustainable product distribution.

The purpose of this paper to investigate the effectiveness of selected search features in the major English and Chinese search engines and compare the search engines’ retrieval effectiveness.

The search engines Google, Google China, and Baidu were selected for this study. Common search features such as title search, basic search, exact phrase search, PDF search, and URL search, were identified and used. Search results from using the five features in the search engines were collected and compared. One‐way ANOVA and regression analysis were used to compare the retrieval effectiveness of the search engines.

It was found that Google achieved the best retrieval performance with all five search features among the three search engines. Moreover Google achieved the best webpage ranking performance.

The findings of this study improve the understanding of English and Chinese search engines and the differences between them in terms of search features, and can be used to assist users in choosing appropriate and effective search strategies when they search for information on the internet.

The original contributions of this paper are that the Chinese and English search engines in both languages are compared for retrieval effectiveness. Five search features were evaluated, compared, and analysed in the two different language environments by using the discounted cumulative gain method.

The aim of this paper is to examine the phenomenon of search engine optimization (SEO) as a mechanism for improving libraries' digital content findability on the web.

The study applies web analytical tools, such as Alexa.com, in the collection of data about Canadian libraries' visibility performance in the ranking of search engine results. Concepts from the Integrated IS&R Research Framework are applied to analyze SEO as an element within the Framework.

The results show that certain websites' characteristics do have an effect on how well libraries' websites are ranked by search engines. Notably, the reputation of a library's website and the number of its search engine indexed webpages increase its ranking on SERPs as well as the findability of its digital content.

Most of the existing works on SEO have been confined to popular literature, outside of scholarly academic research in library and information science. Only few studies with a focus on libraries' application of SEO exist. No known study has applied an empirical approach to the examination of relevant libraries' website characteristics to determine their visibility performance on search engine result pages (SERPs). This study identified several website characteristics that can be optimized for higher SERP rankings. It also analyzed the impact of external links, as well as that of the number of indexed webpages by search engines on higher SERP rankings.

The objective of this study is to measure the navigation quality of the corporate webpages of the principal European financial entities, given the vital importance of the accessibility of online content for the successful execution of their operational activities.

The web quality model proposes a structure that allows the quality of corporate webpages to be analysed according to the three main quality criteria of content, presentation and ease of navigation (navigability). Bonsón et al. take this theoretical framework as their point of departure for analysing the webpages of the principal European financial entities, and they measure the quality of their content in the context of the extra significance these webpages will acquire when the new Basel II international regulations enter into force in the imminent future. In this study, a joint analysis is made of the results of both studies in order to classify European financial entities according to the strategy adopted for their web sites.

The size of the entity behind the corporate webpage is revealed as the key variable that explains better navigability. There is also a positive relationship between the navigability and the content presented, which shows that companies' strategies for improving the quality of their web site tend to be harmonised in respect of these two criteria.

The approach of most of the entities to their web presence can be characterised as informational in the sense that they are making substantial efforts to improve the content, driven by impending new regulation. However, they are still not utilising various devices available to make their web sites easier to navigate. Better navigability would improve user access to the enhanced information provided.

The resources have been determined that are needed to improve navigability so that these entities can advance their web site strategies and provide a harmonious combination of adequate content and fast, easy access to that content.

Detecting emotion on user experience of web applications and browsing is important in many ways. Web designers and developers find such approach quite useful in enhancing navigational features of webpages, and biomedical personnel regularly use computer simulations to monitor and control the behaviour of patients. On the other hand, law enforcement agents rely on human physiological functions to determine the likelihood of falsehood in interrogations. Quite often, online user experience is studied via tangible measures such as task completion time, surveys and comprehensive tests from which data attributes are generated. Prediction of users' emotion and behaviour in some of these cases depends mostly on task completion time and number of clicks per given time interval. However, such approaches are generally subjective and rely heavily on distributional assumptions making the results prone to recording errors.

The authors propose a novel method-a window dynamic control system that addresses the foregoing issues. Primary data were obtained from laboratory experiments during which forty-four volunteers had their synchronised physiological readings, skin conductance response (SCR), skin temperature (ST), eye movement behaviour and users’ activity attributes taken using biosensors. The window-based dynamic control system (PHYCOB I) is integrated to the biosensor which collects secondary data attributes from these synchronised physiological readings and uses them for two purposes. For both detection of optimal emotional responses and users' stress levels. The method's novelty derives from its ability to integrate physiological readings and eye movement records to identify hidden correlates on a webpage.

Results show that the control system detects basic emotions and outperforms other conventional models in terms of both accuracy and reliability, when subjected to model comparison that is, the average recoverable natural structures for the three models with respect to accuracy and reliability are more consistent within the window-based control system environment than with the conventional methods.

The paper is limited to using a window control system to detect emotions on webpages, while integrated to biosensors and eye-tracker.

The originality of the proposed model is its resistance to overfitting and its ability to automatically assess human emotion (stress levels) while dealing with specific web contents. The latter is particularly important in that it can be used to predict which contents of webpages cause stress-induced emotions to users when involved in online activities.