3.3.6.1 Search engine use awareness

Search engines use different syntaxes to improve requests pertinence:

Search engine syntax examples

The most famous are the ―Boolean operators‖ for example the following request: Search+engine will look at websites where only both those keywords are present.

It exists dozens of those tools per search engine and syntaxes differ sometimes from one search engine to another. Some search engines are also providing some syntaxes which are not present in others.

Some search engines are then complementary.

The idea behind Boolean operators is "I seek a good site on this topic, but I don’t have a specific site in mind. More than three quarters of the surveyed users desire to access the best site regarding this topic." (Broder, A.Z. (2002). A taxonomy of web search. SIGIR Forum 36(2) pp. 3-10)

According to a Canadian study (Skooiz. (2008). Comment les Québecois utilisent ils et cherchent ils sur Internet ?.) 54% of Canadian users use Boolean operators:

Use of advanced search functionalities in Canada

According to a Chinese study (Insight Xplorer. (2006). 創市際市場研究顧問.) 66,7% of Chinese Internet users understand Boolean operators.

On the other hand according to a Canadian (Crepuq. (2003). Information Literacy: Study of Incoming First-Year Undergraduates in Quebec.) and a Belgium (EduDoc. (2008). Enquête sur les compétences documentaires et informationnelles des étudiants qui accèdent à l’enseignement supérieur en Communauté française de Belgique.) study it seems that the most basic Boolean operators are not used properly:

Do users know how to use Boolean operators?

Another study (Jansen, J .B./Spink, A. (2004). How are we searching the World Wide Web? A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs.) untitled: "How are we searching the World Wide Web: A comparison of nine search engine transaction logs" made in the United States and Europe shows that the use of Boolean operators has been stable from 1997 to 2002.

It is also saying that the use of Boolean operators differ from Europe to the United States. For the USA it goes from 11 to 20% whereas in Europe from 2 to 10%.

They put as well in evidence the existence of search engine dependency in terms of the use of query operators with a particular search-engine system.

Another study (Beitzel, S.M./Jensen, E. C./Chowdhury, A./Grossman, D./Frieder, O. (2004). Hourly analysis of a very large topically categorized Web query log.) made in 2004 is confirming those low figures stating that only 2% out of hundreds of millions queries were containing Boolean operators.

Users then know the existence of Boolean operators, however they are not using them and if they do so they are not using them properly.