Project team
Searching & Evaluating Information on the WWW
Duration
Start January 2007, Open-ended project
Funding
Budget resources of KMRC
Description
In this project we focus on different processes relevant during seeking for information (1) on the World Wide Web (WWW) and (2) within complex information portals.
Searching & evaluating information on the WWW
In this area we aim at supporting the processes of information evaluation.
The WWW as information source offers a huge amount of available information
for varying purposes and with varying standards of quality. Therefore, adequate
evaluation strategies are a critical factor for the success of the searcher.
We investigate the metacognitive processes of information evaluation (e.g. of
relevance and quality) while searching for controversial scientific information
on the web (e.g. different medical therapies). Metacognitive processes are recorded
by subjective methods (e.g. questionnaires, retrospective interviews) as well
as observational methods (e.g. eye-tracking combined with retrospective verbal
protocols).
In regard to the design of search engines an additional research topic is
to investigate how the presentation of search results affects users' search
behaviour and evaluation processes. One aim is for example to augment the searchers
awareness of the information quality by changes in the organisation of the search
results. Furthermore, within a research cooperation with Prof. Dr. Peter Pirolli
(Xerox PARC, Palo Alto Research Center, USA) the focus lies on the development
and empirical evaluation of innovative search tools.
Searching & navigating in complex information portals
In this area we focus on the processes of searching and navigating within Web sites and complex information portals. They offer information which is pre-selected and pre-evaluated with regard to content and quality. This topic is investigated in cooperation with the KMRC lab Knowledge Construction on the example of the portal e-teaching.org. We aim at deepening our understanding of usage strategies and usability problems while seeking information in complex portals with different navigation options. Particularly, different eye-tracking studies showed how the portal e-teaching.org supported different usage scenarios and how changes in the interface could optimize the portal usability.