Introduction: The purpose of this study is to replicate a study from 2007, which found that student users trust in Google's ability to rank results more than in their own relevance judgements. Method: In a between-subjects experiment using eye-tracking methodology, participants (n=25) worked on search tasks where the results ranking on search…

Introduction: Use of the Internet for open Web searches is common among university students in academic learning tasks. The tools used by students to find relevant information for online assessment tasks were investigated and their information seeking behaviour was documented to explore the impact on assessment design. Method: A mixed methods…

Introduction: A model to explore the relations among local and global relevance-based information behaviour is proposed that is based on objective and subjective measures of the relevance of the Website contents. Method: Global interest for the Website was researched using data on visits, while local use was explored with two surveys on the…

Introduction: The purpose of this study is to compare characteristics and features of user supplied tags and search query terms for images on the "Flickr" Website in terms of categories of pictorial meanings and level of term specificity. Method: This study focuses on comparisons between tags and search queries using Shatford's categorization…

Introduction: Investigates how effectively Web search engines index new sites from different countries. The primary interest is whether new sites are indexed equally or whether search engines are biased towards certain countries. If major search engines show biased coverage it can be considered a significant economic and political problem because…

Introduction: This paper extends a series on summaries of Web objects, in this case, the alt attribute of image files. Method: Data were logged from 1894 pages from Yahoo!'s random page service and 4703 pages from the Google directory; an img tag was extracted randomly from each where present; its alt attribute, if any, was recorded; and the…

Introduction: Knowing the credibility of information about genetically modified food on the Internet is critical to the everyday life information seeking of consumers as they form opinions about this nascent agricultural technology. The Website Quality Evaluation Tool (WQET) is a valuable instrument that can be used to determine the credibility of…