Measuring user perceptions of web site reputation

  • Authors:

  • Elaine G. Toms;Adam R. Taves

  • Affiliations:

  • Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 3G6;Faculty of Information Studies, University of Toronto, 140 St. George Street, Toronto, Ont., Canada M5S 3G6

  • Venue:
  • Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

In this study, we compare a search tool, TOPIC, with three other widely used tools that retrieve information from the Web: AltaVista, Google, and Lycos. These tools use different techniques for outputting and ranking Web sites: external link structure (TOPIC and Google) and semantic content analysis (Alta-Vista and Lycos). TOPIC purports to output, and highly rank within its hit list, reputable Web sites for searched topics. In this study, 80 participants reviewed the output (i.e., highly ranked sites) from each tool and assessed the quality of retrieved sites. The 4800 individual assessments of 240 sites that represent 12 topics indicated that Google tends to identify and highly rank significantly more reputable Web sites than TOPIC, which, in turn, outputs more than AltaVista and Lycos, but this was not consistent from topic to topic. Metrics derived from reputation research were used in the assessment and a factor analysis was employed to identify a key factor, which we call 'repute'. The results of this research include insight into the factors that Web users consider in formulating perceptions of Web site reputation, and insight into which search tools are outputting reputable sites for Web users. Our findings, we believe, have implications for Web users and suggest the need for future research to assess the relationship between Web page characteristics and their perceived reputation.