Web Information Search Behavior Of Undergraduates

With human being moving from the agricultural age through the industrial age and into the information age,technology promotes innovation all the way.Internet,the power to change everything,is transforming the world in all aspects.With the increasing online information,researches on the users’ information search behavior came to be paid extensive attentions.Information behavior researchers and information systems developers continuously explore the interactive search behavior of Internet users to help users better search for information.Cognitive style,one of the most important factors affecting individuals,has become new direction of information behavior research.Firstly,the cognitive style of college students were tested,and the test results show:①Wholists account for 25.8%of the total,intermediate users account for 56.1%of the total,and analytics users account for 18.1%of the total.Verbalisers account for 8.1%of the total,bimodal users account for 33.2%of the total,accounting for 58.7 percent representation imagers.②Based on the above-mentioned results,gender,age,major(academic),differences of cognitive styles were compared,and the results show that verbalisers-imagers style dimension there are significant differences between the sexes;Other factors in other cognitive style dimension no significant differences.③The study also compared the cognitive styles of college students from New Zealand and China.With respect to two different languages from two cultures,compared with New Zealand college students with English as their mother tongue,Chinese college students prefer to imagery and wholistic characteristics,and the results of this study just to verify this.In order to learn about web search behavior of college students,three aspects of college students’ web information search behavior were surveyed.The findings show that:①Information needs,College students is in great need of online information and most of them have confidence in expressing their information.Information resources that college students need are mostly the video resources,hypertext resources and audio resources.And there are significant differences of the hypertext resources,online games and software resources between genders and girls tend to demand more resources for hypertext,while boys are likely to choose online games and software resources.As for motivation of information search,the boys tend to meet their entertainment needs,while girls tend meet their shopping needs.②Information search behavior habits,the frequently used tool when college students search for information is the search engine Baidu.When using search engines,most users never used advanced search function of search engine,and it is hoped that retrieved results can be ranked according to relevance of a query,and users usually look over the first 6-10 search results,and most users can get the information they need with 3 or 4 steps.The majority of them never got any education about information literacy,and they never heard of Boolean logic symbols,and they thought sometimes they encountered"navigation lost" phenomenon in the information search.Many users have their preferences for some web sites such as Baidu,Taobao and so on when they search for information or shop online.③Self-evaluation and resource evaluation,College students appreciated their own information search behavior,and they thought the difficulties they encountered when searching for information online are mainly caused by too much content in websites,the confusion of classified system of websites,lack of guidance,And compared with boys,girls tend to believe that too much content in websites would distract their attention and affect the efficiency of information search.As for the evaluation of web information resources,college students think that slow internet connection,speed of system response and the novelty,reliability and accuracy of information are the main causes that affect the recall of precision of information search.These findings reveal the general rules and characteristics of the college students’ needs for web information resources and their information behavior which provides preliminary research support for follow-up empirical research of information behavior based on cognitive style.Finally,the literature review summarizes the effects of cognitive style on the web information search behavior are mainly reflected in two aspects of the behavior of processes:query reformulation and web navigational styles.By designing the experiment,and with the qualitative and quantitative research,video content was analyzed from the information processing and information search behavior.The results show that:①In query reformulation,from the perspective of information search behavior research,As for,query reformulation among the users of four cognitive style groups,wholists were found to be more active in query reformulation,when they submitted relatively more queries while searching information on the web than others of cognitive style groups.While formulating search queries,most participants preferred new queries,while analytics who seemed to prefer adding any other forms of query reformulations.Verbalisers executed a higher number of add,parallel movement,and replace query reformulations than their imagery peers.They tended to use language well opposed to imagers.On the other hand,imagers seemed to lack linguistic expression to modify their queries and use search terms.It may be due to this reason that they submitted a higher number of new and used queries.From the perspective of cognitive information processing,wholists and verbalisers adopted a top-down approach to information searching,on the other hand analytics and imagers tended to prefer bottom-up approach.②In web navigational styles,from the perspective of information search behavior research,wholists and imagers searched longer than analytics and verbalisers peers,while analytics and verbalisers submitted a relatively higher number of page visits and buttom clicks compared to their wholistand imagers peers.Because different cognitive styles have different information search behaviors,users with different cognitive styles appeared different behaviors as above when they accomplished the different tasks in searching time,numbers of page visits and buttom clicks.From the perspective of cognitive information processing,wholists imagers seemed to prefer reading in order to get the information they need,while their verbalisers and analytics tended to process information through scanning.In the end,this paper summarizes the findings,proposes suggestion,and states the contribution and limitations of this study,and then points out the future of research.