A cognitive study of information seeking processes in the WWW: the effects of searcher´s knowledge and experience

We investigated, through a cognitive psychological experiment and its protocol analysis, human cognitive processes of seeking information on the WWW and the effects of a subject´s knowledge and experience on the information seeking processes and performance. In our experiment, the subjects were divided into two groups: one comprising expert subjects and the other novice subjects. All subjects were given a general search task and a specific search task. In the experimental results, except for one exceptional subject, we could confirm significant differences between the two groups in the solution time, the number of pages searched, and the kind of pages accessed. We also propose a behavioral schema for tracing a subject´s searching processes. The behavioral schema consists of four behavior levels on the WWW: search, results-of-search, page-following results, and page-following pages. Each subject´s behavior was described as a transition of nodes, each representing the subject´s behavioral state, and six kinds of operator connecting two nodes: search, link, return, jump, browse, and next among the four behavior levels. The results of an analysis using the schema showed distinctive subject behavior such as a breadth-first search or depth-first search.