The purpose of this thesis is to identify and quantify the information clues found in the
document representations in the World Wide Web environment. This study uses three
topics to find document representations: custom publishing, distance education, and
tactile graphics. Four Web search engines are used: AltaVista, InfoSeek Ultra, Lycos,
and Open Text Index. The findings of the random sample show that the search engines
produce little duplication in their display of the results. Just over half of the cases reveal
information clues about the document's authorship, origin, format or subject. The
summary field shows the highest number of information clues. The title and Uniform
Resource Locator fields do not contain many information clues. Few of the fields contain
clues about the authorship of the documents. Topical relevance is questionable in many of
the cases. The study recommends further research on the comparison of search engines,
on the study of searches on the Web for commercial, academic and personal topics, and
on information seeking behaviors relating to Web searching. Recommendations are made
for Web training and Web page design to assist users in finding relevant information more
quickly.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:BVAU.2429/5855 |
| Date | 05 1900 |
| Creators | Epp, Mary Anne |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Relation | UBC Retrospective Theses Digitization Project [http://www.library.ubc.ca/archives/retro_theses/] |
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