“Experience” and WWW Searching, or the Search for the Www “Expert”
Andrew Thatcher · Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting · 2000
Observational, log-file and post-task interview data were collected from forty subjects while they were engaged in a directed search task and a general purpose browsing task. This data was used to determine the search strategies of experienced and novice users on the two tasks. These results suggest that the search strategies vary according to the task and according to experience. It is suggested that experienced users' strategies differ more on the two tasks than novice users. These results are discussed in relation to previous published literature on WWW cognitive search strategies.