User web search behavior on query formulation

Abstract

World Wide Web (WWW) is information rich environment. The access and document posted on WWW has rapidly grown since it was popularized in 1990s. The abundance of information on WWW cause information overload problem, where users find hard to filter and select information return by the search system. Moreover, the growth of new inexperienced users creates new challenges for information retrieval researchers. It has become increasingly difficult for these users to find relevant documents that satisfying their information need. This problem is due to the fact that this category of user is unable to express his exact need of information which leads to the use of inappropriate keywords or queries. This paper presents a study of the user searching behavior on query formulation. In this paper, query formulation is divided into two categories; breadth and depth query strategies. The findings of this study show that breadth query strategy is the most popular strategy.