What Users Know and Why They Know It
Frederick L. Brown · Internet Reference Services Quarterly · 1999
This article studies the searching behavior of four frequent Northern Light searchers and four frequent Yahoo searchers. Participants, who were Library and Information Science students at the University of Washington, were observed as they searched in their regular search service for the answers to library reference-type questions. All participants received the same questions. Users' search styles were found to mirror the differing behind-the-scenes rules that the two search services apply to search strings. Northern Light searchers were more likely to use Boolean operators than were Yahoo users. Northern Light users were more likely to use upper-case letters. Finally, they tended to employ truncating symbols more frequently. However, these users had trouble stating explicitly the rules of their search service, even though these rules clearly influenced their searching.