Student Searching Behavior and the Web: Use of Academic Resources and Google

Abstract

This article reports results of two user studies of search engine use conducted to evaluate the United Kingdom’s national academic sector digital information services and projects. The results presented here focus on student searching behavior and show that commercial Internet search engines dominate students’ information-seeking strategy. Forty-five percent of students use Google as their first port of call when locating information, with the university library catalogue used by 10 percent of the sample. Results of students’ perceptions of ease of use, success, time taken to search, and reasons for stopping a search are also presented.

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