Open AccessLearning to Search and Searching to Learn: Income, Education, and Experience Online
Author(s) -
Howard Philip N.,
Massanari Adrienne
Publication year - 2007
Publication title -
journal of computer‐mediated communication
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 4.15
H-Index - 119
ISSN - 1083-6101
DOI - 10.1111/j.1083-6101.2007.00353.x
Subject(s) - sophistication , casual , the internet , online search , privilege (computing) , search engine , psychology , search analytics , internet privacy , computer science , world wide web , sociology , web search query , political science , social science , computer security , law
Using data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveys, this article explores changing trends in reported sophistication and satisfaction with search skills and with search engines. We find that the proportion of Internet users searching online for answers to specific questions—as opposed to casual browsing—has grown significantly. Moreover, as users get more experience online, they increasingly become dependent on search engines, confident in their findings, and savvy about how search engines structure information, privilege paid results, and track users. When other factors are controlled, years of online experience is a strong predictor of the likelihood of a person doing specific searches on a daily basis, and experience can have an even stronger positive effect than education and income. We also find that years of online experience, frequency of use, and sophistication with multiple search engines can overcome socio‐economic status in predicting how active a person is in searching across different topics.