Search

This study investigates how a search interface that displays users' ultimate query (i.e. users' current search goal) can cope with the age-related decrease of fluid abilities and support older users' search behaviours. 30 young and 18 older adults completed 9 search problems with a regular web browser or with the experimental search interface. Results showed that older adults spent longer time on the search engine result pages, they needed more time to reformulate, and they had more difficulties exploring the search paths elaborated. Age-differences also appeared as soon as the beginning of the search. The support tool helped older users reformulate their queries more rapidly and elaborate more flexible search strategies at the beginning of the activity. Indeed, older adults who interacted with the support tool switched to the processing of a new search path more rapidly instead of exploiting their initial query (i.e. they visited fewer websites for the initial query produced and reformulated a query instead of keeping on conducting a deeper investigation of the search results provided in the search engine result page). Implications of these findings for the design of effective support tools for older users are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study aimed at investigating how pre-activating prior topic knowledge before browsing the web can support information search performance and strategies of young and older users. The experiment focus on analyzing to what extent prior knowledge pre-activation might cope with older users' difficulties when interacting with a search engine. 26 older (age 60 to 77) and 22 young (age 18 to 32) adults performed 6 information search problems related to health and fantastic movies. Overall, results showed that pre-activating prior topic knowledge increased the time spent evaluating the search engine results pages, fostered deeper processing of the navigational paths elaborated (and thus reduced the exploration of different navigational paths) and improved the semantic specificity of queries. Pre-activating prior knowledge helped older adults produced semantically more specific queries when they had lower prior-knowledge than young adults. Moderation analyses indicated that the pre-activation supported older adults' search performance under the condition that participants generated semantically relevant keywords during this pre-activation task. Implications of these results show that prior topic knowledge pre-activation may be a good lead to support the beneficial role of prior knowledge in older users' search behavior and performance. Recommendations for design pre-activation support tool are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study addressed the age-related differences in query production and information searching performance when interacting with a search engine. To this end, 20 older adults and 20 young ones performed 12 information search problems of varying complexity in two knowledge domains (health and fantastic movies). Participants had simple (useful keywords provided and answer directly accessible in Google), inferential (inferences to produce useful keywords required) and multicriteria problems (information gathering and navigation required). Results showed that older adults produced their first query with more keywords extracted from the search problem statements and spent more time on the search engine pages than young ones. In the fantastic movies, older adults struggled more than young ones and had difficulties reformulating their queries (i.e. fewer new keywords produced, more statement provided keywords). Older adults especially struggled at the beginning of the search (more time spent on the first search engine result page than young ones and they produced less elaborate initial query). In contrast, in the health domain, higher prior knowledge helped older users reformulate queries that were more elaborated (i.e.no age-related differences on the number of new keywords) and improved the processing of the first search engine page consulted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]