Evaluation of a visually categorized search engine

Kursat Cagiltay (1) , Berrin Dogusoy (1)

1 Department of Computer Education and Instructional Technology

World Wide Web is developing with the increasing demands of the users and the search engines are becoming an indispensable tool in order to find information in Internet. While web is developing day by day, people require adapting themselves to the developing conditions rapidly. Also, the intensive workload requires that people should use the time properly. Using search engines effectively turns out to be a vital. The purpose of this study is to investigate the possible search behavior of the users by using eye-tracking device. With this study, it may be possible to observe the participants' searching strategies while searching for a specific key word and seeking the related results for a subject. The results showed that, many of the participants had problems while using this search engine as they were not familiar with it. Almost all of the participants had a centralized approach while searching specific information in an unfamiliar search engine. Participants' fixation duration times and the hotspot data supported this result. Also, icon based approach was very common between participants that they tended to look at the bigger and colored icons more than the other icons.

Keywords: technology enhanced learning (TEL); search engines; searching strategies; visual categorization; eye-tracking

Domains: Technology for Human Learning

Kursat Cagiltay, Berrin Dogusoy. Evaluation of a visually categorized search engine. Young researchers furthering development of TEL research in Central and Eastern Europe, 2007, Sofia, Bulgaria. ⟨hal-00190050⟩