Title: Studying and analysing students web search behaviours within three Jordanian universities

Authors: Abdullah Hamdi Wahbeh; Mohammed Naji Al-Kabi; Majdi Ahmad Maabreh; Izzat Mahmoud Al-Smadi; Emad Mahmoud Al-Shawakfa

Addresses: College of Business and Information Systems, Dakota State University, 1051 N Summit Ave. Apt 13, Madison, SD 57042, USA ' Faculty of Sciences and IT, Zarqa University, P.O. Box 132222, 13132 Zarqa, Jordan ' ICT and E-learning Center, The Hashemite University, Computer Centre, 13115 Zarqa, Jordan ' Department of Computer Information Systems, Faculty of IT and CS, Yarmouk University, 21163, Irbid, Jordan ' Department of Computer Information Systems, Faculty of IT and CS, Yarmouk University, 21163, Irbid, Jordan

Abstract: The World Wide Web has become a phenomenon. The web is a crucial source of information for almost every person. Peoples with different jobs using the internet to meet their professional needs, and the university students constitute a large segment of those people who use the internet frequently to accomplish their information needs. This research has conducted an investigation to determine how Jordanian university students are using the web, what are the characteristics of queries used when searching the internet, what are the top searched queries, ..., etc. All these goals are achieved after extracting different queries and information from these web log files and analysing them. Results have showed that students are interested in topics related to entertainment and society more than topics related to their studies. Students submit short queries consisting of 1, 2, or 3 terms with little usage of different query operators. Unsurprisingly, they use Google as the preferred search engine and Arabic as the preferred search language.

Keywords: web search engines; web logs; blogs; search trends; information retrieval; query log analysis; Jordan; student searches; search behaviour; universities; higher education.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCEELL.2014.063057

International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 2014 Vol.24 No.3/4, pp.388 - 402

Published online: 19 Jul 2014 *

Full-text access for editors Full-text access for subscribers Purchase this article Comment on this article