A perceptions survey on the factors influencing web searching abilities of IT and CS academics

Search results from existing web search engines are usually imprecise as they often yield matches to too many irrelevant web pages, making it difficult for some users to find the information they are looking for. But on the other hand, many users are still able to successfully use these web search engines in their daily activities. The aim of this paper is therefore to examine factors influencing the web searching abilities of web engines users specifically for academic staff in the computing disciplines. It presents the results of a questionnaire based survey of 61 academic staff drawn from Information Technology and Computer Science departments from four Universities in the Kwazulu-Natal and Eastern Cape provinces of South Africa. The data analysis shows an association between staff searching ability and demographic attributes such as academic qualifications, staff positions, and their years of research experience. They also show that there is a correlation between web searching ability and lecturing experience, and between searching ability and English language proficiency. The novel finding of this study compared to existing literature is the impact of lecturing experience on searching ability.