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.
