Abbreviations, Full Spellings, and Searchers’ Preferences

This study examined ten, selected word pairs, each containing a word’s full spelling and its abbreviation, to determine which form search engine users preferred in searching. Using seven search logs gathered from several Internet search engines with approximately 608 MB of data, the study measured the occurrences of the twenty terms. The selected words are important in library cataloging, for some are prescribed abbreviations in metadata content standards. The study found that in eight of the ten word pairs users preferred to search words’ full spellings over the abbreviations, often by a high margin.