Web Search Skills Study

[msgraph]

Skip through the math and you can find some good nuggets of information on user studies that monitored web searching patterns. Personally I believe they could have used some better examples for keywords.

The vast majority of college students have been reared as researchers in an environment where boundaries for information have been clearly marked, i.e., that of books and paper text. Increasingly, however, they are called upon to perform tasks in an environment not clearly bounded, that of hyperspace. How do we learn to surf in this unfamiliar medium? What strategies do people use when surfing through the unbounded space of hyperlinks or the World Wide Web (WWW)?

Mining User's Web Searching Skills: Fuzzy Cognitive State Map vs. Markovian Modeling [citeseer.nj.nec.com]

[jeremy goodrich]

Fuzzy cognative state = exactly the kind of thing I want to see in any research reading for my weekend.

Many thanks, printed it off, will be reading over the next few days.

There is a graph inside that paper, too - that matches *exactly* an algorithm I wrote last week. :)