Determinants of Web Search Effectiveness From the Perspective of Library and Information Science Students

Introduction

As more information is added and uploaded on various websites, the searching of such websites to satisfy academic information needs by undergraduate students generally, and library and information science undergraduates particularly, is on the increase. The emergence of the Internet has created millions of end users who search for information themselves as postulated by Xie (2010). Web search or information searching can be defined as users’ purposive behaviour in finding relevant and useful information in their interactions with the information retrieval system (Knight, & Spink, 2008). Searching and accessing relevant and comprehensive information is difficult because of the complexity in searching literature from various information resources especially from digital resources.

Web searching is now a common phenomenon among undergraduate students. Most of these students now depend largely on web information resources to tackle given assignments and research. The Web has grown into a vital channel of communication and an important vehicle for information dissemination and retrieval, 'which is exerting power over the evolution and development of information-seeking behaviour' (Martzoukou, 2005; Tella & Oyegunle, 2016). The enormous amount of digital information accessible today poses a great challenge to information retrieval systems to retrieve effectively the information the user needs. Within this dynamic and vastly diverse searching environment, information seeking behaviour studies, and traditional search systems are not able to provide mechanisms for rich information retrieval to users as compare to searching through the Web (Martzoukou, 2005).

Web searching services such as Google and Yahoo are now the search engines that people access every day to find information. Some studies that investigated such issues have recommended that Web search trends are important for both users and Web search engines alike (Florida Community College, 2018). User's Web search context can be examined at many levels, including the information environment/social level, organizational level, information seeking level, human-computer interaction level and query level (Spink & Jensen, 2004). To understand better Web search effectiveness, there is need to understand the factors that promote or determine search effectiveness.

The Web has enabled users to electronically publish information and makes it accessible to millions of people with ease. However, as the quantity of this information grows, the ability of those people finding relevant materials decreased dramatically. Researchers (like Russell-Rose, 2011; Tella, 2011; Tella & Oyedokun, 2014; Tella, et al. 2017; Khan, have shown a growing interest in the information-search activities of undergraduate students. These authors emphasised that people want information at the point they need them but don’t bother about the necessary skills they need to develop to access the needed information. Students, when confronted with a decision-making situation (such as seeking for information to satisfy a need) they must decide when and where to search for information, when to rely on their own expertise or intuition, and when to rely on the advice of others. Time and resource constraints also undoubtedly influence their information-search activities, as well as the importance they place on different issues.