Abstract

If there is a company that has transformed the World Wide Wide, it’s Google. Today, Google is much more than just a search engine. The Mountain View enterprise is known for its capacity for innovation, its tools for automated analysis of information, and its business venture in video publicity, which has made it the primary advertising agency in the world. Google is a Netcentric company that is developing a new generation of applications that conform to their fundamental online operating system, moving from the PC to the World Wide Web.

Abstract

Users access to Google to find out about health issues is frequent among citizens. This research analyzes the best results of three generic searches on homeopathy, collected in four waves in five countries: Spain, France, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Specifically, the fluctuation of the corpus ranking is studied, and a sample of the ten best-positioned pages in each country is taken to analyze their content (the authorship of the website, the stance of the effectiveness of homeopathy, the presence of controversy and the type of content). The results show that the ranking is stable; that the stance of homeopathy is linked to the state of public opinion in the country; the majority of better-positioned websites being of news published in the media.

Abstract

Providing support for users during their search sessions has\\ud been hailed as a major challenge in interactive information retrieval\\ud (IIR). Providing such support requires considering the context of the\\ud search and facilitating the work task at hand. In this paper, we consider\\ud the work tasks associated with air traffic analysts, who perform numerous\\ud searches using a multifaceted search interface in order to acquire business\\ud intelligence regarding particular events and situations. In particular, we\\ud develop a novel task completion engine and seamlessly incorporated it\\ud within a current air traffic search system to facilitate the comparison\\ud of information objects found. In a study with 24 participants, we found\\ud that they completed the complex work task faster using the comparison\\ud feature, but for simple work tasks, participants were slower. However,\\ud participants reported (statistically) significantly higher satisfaction and\\ud had (statistically) significantly higher accuracy using the search system\\ud equipped with task completion engine. These findings help to steer systems to provide a better support to users in their search process. Document type: Part of book or chapter of book