The search problem. There are millions of Web
pages, no one knows how many, it's like trying to estimate the number
of pebbles on the beach. A number of services exist which allow users
to search the Web by content (i.e. Yahoo, AltaVista,
OpenText, WebCrawler). Some of these resources are more
structured than others; Yahoo, for instance, allows users to limit
searches by category, or to browse through indexed sets of Web sites.
More commonly, searchers are presented with a dialog box similiar to
this:
What rules apply to the query a user enters into such a box? Is
boolean searching allowed, and in what form? Since every search
engine has limitations on what part of the web is indexed, what are
the limitations of the underlying database? What effort has been made
to insure that sites indexed are current and appropriate? In many
search engines, this information is either unstated or buried deep
within the site.
Occasionally, a search engine will offer a more sophisticated
search form, like the one below, which is modeled after the
OpenText
power search form:
Observation
(Wallace and
Kupperman, 1996) has indicated that students rarely take
advantage of the features offered by these more complex search forms
and that when they do, their uses of advanced querying capabilities
does not result in effective search techniques
(Greene, Devlin, Cannata &
Gomez, 1990). Having students engage in unstructured searching on
the Web may be unproductive
(Wallace and
Kupperman, 1996). My own observation has been that students
involved in unstructured searching spend far more time trying to use
the search engines than they do interacting with content pages.