Students use of search engines -Reply

[Diane Nahl]

I am currently involved in a study of how students use web search 
engines.  Twenty undergrads without any web or Internet experience are in 
a summer social psychology course that uses the web as its focus.  The 
students have to put up home pages and deposit all of their assignments 
there, etc.  I will have detailed information from the sstudents on their 
particular experience using search engines.

Some preliminary observations on novices learning Web search engines:

The first problem novices encounter is "what is a search engine?"

Next, "What are these things?" (On a page listing the various engines it 
isn't clear that each one is a link to a certain search engine.)

Next, "how do I choose one?" from a list of them (Netscape's list or a 
longer list I maintain, or other available lists).

Next, "what do I type?" (The conceptual analysis problem, natural 
language problem, etc.)

Next, "I don't see what I got." (They often just do not see the postings 
on the screen--a kind of screen blindness effect.  The screens are highly 
organized and THE MOST prominent thing is often an advertisement that 
has, of course, nothing to do with the search, so they wonder aloud, 
"what's this doing here?", and miss the postings.)

Next, "What are these things?" (The default description is not clear 
enough as to what it is going to be about, so is it relevant?)

Next, "Why is this stuff here?"  "What does this have to do with  the 
topic?" (Their search terms were too broad, narrow, numerous; they did 
not select any options to control the precision; they did not see the 
options at all--screen blindness; they did not look for options; they did 
not think about how to describe their topic for the search; they 
extracted words directly from the topic statement they chose; they did 
not explore any links in the retrieved set to see what it it about and 
how it might relate, or not, to their topic,etc.)

If there is interest, I will summarize the findings for this list after 
the analysis is complete later this summer.

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_/  School of Library and Information Studies            _/   on we     _/
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