Evaluation of search quality differences and the impact of personality styles in native and foreign language searching tasks

Taking individual differences into consideration is a foundational issue of Human-Computer Interaction research. The current paper examines the differences that arise during native and foreign language information-seeking tasks. Seventeen Hungarian college students, with significant but non-heritage knowledge of English, participated in the study. We examined the impact of search strategies and personality types on search outcome quality. Our results show interesting variations in searchers' success in their native and foreign languages. In-depth search strategies work better and allow searchers to achieve the same success rate in a foreign language as in their native language. More empathy toward the search task also seems to improve results.