An empirical research on factors affecting web search behavior

There are many factors that affect users' web search behavior. This paper discussed the factors affecting web search behavior from three dimensions, including cognitive style, knowledge and experience, user's emotion. During the study, we chose 100 university students and 150 employees as respondents to make experiment. Among these respondents, university students contain undergraduates and masters, employees are from various industries and they are all working in small and medium enterprises. First, we set two searching tasks and let respondents to complete. In particular, the difficulties of these two tasks are different. Second, let respondents to finish the questionnaire. Finally, based on the data from the questionnaire, we used SPSS 22.0 to conduct correlation analysis and liner regression. The result shows that different cognitive style, knowledge and experience, user's emotion will affect users' web searching behavior. This conclusion will be helpful in designing and improving the retrieval system, so that it can meet the users' searching needs better. © 2016, Research and Development Office of Wuhan University. All right reserved.