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Web search behavior of university students: A case study at University of the Punjab

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The World Wide Web is now known to be the richest source of information. The growth rate of the web is exponential. This paper explores different aspects of web search behavior of university students, in terms of user's background and experience with web, purpose of use, searching skills, query formulation, frequency of use, favorite search engine, etc. All these factors contribute to the way in which the students search the web. Data have been collected from students of the Faculty of Economics and Management Sciences, University of the Punjab, Lahore through questionnaire. Key findings include the use of web for academic tasks, preference of Google, reformulation of query, use of basic and advance search features, browsing of first ten hits and problem of slow speed.
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... Web search activity and online information retrieval and information search studies through surveys, observations and experiments have been carried out (Moon, 2004;Kim, 2008, Lopes, 2016Khan, 2018). In a comprehensive review of these studies, Malik and Mahmood (2009) and Khan (2018) concluded that research on web search activities and behaviour is still in the formative stage. However, they stated that it is not clear whether the factors influencing the search process, effectiveness or outcomes are understood well enough to be effectively studied in a cause-effect study. ...
... The design of the questionnaire was informed by the objectives and research questions of the study. Items in the questionnaire were adapted from the related literature(Zhang, Anghelescu, &Yuan, 2005;Malik & Mahmood, 2009). The questionnaire was divided into two sections A and B. Section A collected data on the respondents' demographic information including gender, year of study, and age. ...
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