Personalised Web search and user satisfaction: a user-centred evaluation.

Abstract

Introduction. Most university students depend significantly, sometimes exclusively, on the Google search engine for their academic information needs. User satisfaction leads to users’ deeper engagement with an information system that is shown to improve learning in an educational setting. This paper evaluates students’ satisfaction with results from personalised Web search against non-personalised Web search. Method. During semi-structured study sessions, twenty-eight participants (university students) were required to complete a series of search tasks using both personalised and non-personalised Web search. Analysis. Evaluation was based on participants’ explicit feedback as well as their implicit behaviour including search time, number of queries and clicked result links per task, finding the answer and relevance of the search results. Results. There was no apparent significant increase in the participants’ overall level of satisfaction with personalised search results compared to non-personalised results. However, it was found that personalised search reduced the time spent to finish a task and reduced the number of clicks required to arrive at the selected outcome. Conclusions. Personalisation of search results does not increase students' satisfaction with their search results. However, it does reduce the time spent by students in locating information they judged to be satisfactory answers to their questions.