User Assessment of Webpage Usefulness

During a web search, the search engines provide relevant pages while the users decide the usefulness of them. The usefulness assessment has been found to be related to various factors. In this study, the effects of task domain and task type on webpage usefulness assessment were investigated. The two task domains involved were health and travel and the two task types were fact finding and decision making. In an experimental environment, 24 participants were asked to do internet search on 4 pre-defined tasks. In the interview after each search task, the users were asked to evaluate the usefulness of each web page they had clicked and talked about why the page was evaluated as such. According to the results of the experiment, we found that the task domain, task type, and various other factors had impacts on the usefulness assessment during web search.