Abstract

We developed guidelines to help users to search information on the internet, and tested their efficacy experimentally. Guidelines for novices on information search were derived from Park and colleagues' earlier study (1998). Search engines were provided either with the above guidelines or without them. Two groups of four novices were assigned to the guideline-provided condition and to the guideline-unprovided condition. They searched on 15 problems of various categories. The results showed that participants provided with guidelines used less number but more various kinds of keywords and solved more problems than participants without guidelines. This indicates that these guidelines could have positive effect on information search of novice users.