Are Web-based informational queries changing?

  • Authors:
  • Chadwyn Tann;Mark Sanderson

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, S1 4DP, United Kingdom;Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, Regent Court, 211 Portobello Street, Sheffield, S1 4DP, United Kingdom

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

This brief communication describes the results of a questionnaire examining certain aspects of the Web-based information seeking practices of university students. The results are contrasted with past work showing that queries to Web search engines can be assigned to one of a series of categories: navigational, informational, and transactional. The survey results suggest that a large group of queries, which in the past would have been classified as informational, have become at least partially navigational. We contend that this change has occurred because of the rise of large Web sites holding particular types of information, such as Wikipedia and the Internet Movie Database. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.