[Sigia-l] Are web users more sophisticated

[Jonathan Baker-Bates]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: sigia-l-admin at asis.org [mailto:sigia-l-admin at asis.org] 
> On Behalf Of Karl Fast
> Sent: 14 July 2004 20:18
> To: SIGIA-L
> Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] Are web users more sophisticated
> 
<snip>
> 
> As noted in my other post, analyses of large query logs have 
> found this pattern repeatedly. But this pattern hasn't shown 
> up in observational studies (not that I'm aware of; I'd love 
> to hear about any studies where this has been observed). I 
> suspect this is probably because even well-designed studies 
> are always slightly artificial.
> 

Sorry I got into this thread a bit late, but I have "conducted" two
"observational studies" on this: once on my mother at Christmas several
years ago, and once on a colleague two years ago. Both times they typed
a URL into Yahoo! right in front of me.

I asked them why they did it, and it seemed that while they knew about
the location bar in the browser, they liked to think that Yahoo! was the
web. That is, they wanted to access the web, so they opened their
browser, which had the site as their home page, and typed in the URL and
hit go. The work colleague even told me that at home she "used
Microsoft" which I assume meant she had MSN as her home page, and the
search box there.

The thing they liked about this was that doing it means you get
high-level a "menu" of things on the site (by page title). 

I could see their point.

Jonathan


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