Studying information seeking on the non-English Web: An experiment on a Spanish business Web portal

  • Authors:

  • Wingyan Chung

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information and Decision Sciences, College of Business Administration, The University of Texas at El Paso, 500 W. University Avenue, El Paso, TX 79968, USA

  • Venue:
  • International Journal of Human-Computer Studies - Human-computer interaction research in the managemant information systems discipline
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The Internet is estimated to grow significantly as access to Web content in some non-English languages continues to increase. However, prior research in human-computer interaction (HCI) has implicitly assumed the primary language used on the Web to be English. This assumption is not true for many non-English-speaking regions where rapidly growing on-line populations access the Web in their native languages. For example, Latin America, where the majority of people speak Spanish, will have the fastest growing population in coming decades. However, existing Spanish search engines lack search, browse, and analysis capabilities. The research reported here studied human information seeking on the non-English Web. In it we developed a Spanish business Web portal that supports searching, browsing, summarization, categorization, and visualization of Spanish business Web pages. Using 42 Spanish speakers as subjects we conducted a two-phase experiment to evaluate this portal and found that, compared with a Spanish search engine and a Spanish Web directory, it achieved significantly better user ratings on information quality, cross-regional search capability, system performance attributes, and overall satisfaction. Subjects' verbal comments strongly favored the search and browse functionality and user interface of our portal. As the Web becomes more international, this research makes three contributions: (1) an empirical evaluation of the performance level of a Spanish search portal; (2) an examination of the information quality, cross-regional search capability and usability of search engines for the non-English Web; and (3) a better understanding of non-English Web searching.