Factors affecting query formulation in Web information search

Abstract

The World Wide Web, which is exponentially growing daily, is also known to be the richest source of information. The Web is universally adopted by university academic communities as a part of their information seeking motivated by a wide variety of needs including academic, professional, personal or entertainment etc. The ability to search and retrieve information from the Web effectively and efficiently is a challenge as current search tools retrieve too many documents of which only a small fraction is relevant to the user query. Studies have revealed that well formulated queries are one of best solutions for this challenge. This study is an attempt to find out the factors affecting query formulation on Web information searching of university academic community. The study is compiled with data gathered from questionnaires of 255 undergraduate students, 107 postgraduate students, 40 NDT students and 30 teaching faculty members. The total response rate is 98.63%. The results indicate Web experience, topic familiarity and search strategies as the identified factors affecting query formulation. The average number of stop words per query decreases when Web used experience increases and the time spent to formulate a query increases when the Web used experience increases. Also, the time spent per query decreases with a familiar topic and he/she desire to use synonyms. Recommendations were made to conduct training programs on available Web information sources/resources and Web searching strategies.