Query generation and search behaviour of German users. [0082] (original) (raw)

The research as described in this document, was done by the first author as noted below. He was a student at the Munich University of Applied Sciences (MUAS) in 2014-the topic was given as a student project. It has not been peer reviewed, but has been edited for basic grammar and accuracy. References have been standardized as far as possible according to the Harvard system. Consider this document as a working paper, to be used for basic referencing but not as seminal source for research work. It could be useful for research in the fields of Website Visibility, Information Retrieval and Search Engines. ABSTRACT Search engines especially Google cover more and more influence about how information is found all over the Internet. Some studies investigated the searching of Web users by analysing huge search logs of search engines. Others studied smaller educated groups. This working paper investigates a small group of people of average skill at various age which represent the everyday people. It analyses their query generation and behaviour while searching. Participants searched for 10 issues logging all queries, search engines, website visits and auto-completion that have been used. Results show that 100% use Google. 26% of the queries were generated using auto-completion and 1.83 websites were viewed in average per search. Slightly differences between genders were monitored. Google knows how people search and Web users trust in Google is very high. This is both good and bad.