Purpose – This paper aims to examine our current knowledge of how searchers perceive and react to the possibility of missing potentially important information whilst searching the web is limited. The study reported here seeks to investigate such perceptions and reactions, and to explore the...

Purpose – This paper aims to report a number of factors that are perceived by web users as influential elements in their search procedure. The paper introduces a new conceptual measure called “web search efficacy” (hereafter WSE) to evaluate the performance of searches mainly based on...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe: a new taxonomy of metacognitive skills designed to support the study of metacognition in the context of web searching; a data collection instrument based on the taxonomy; and the results of testing the instrument on a sample of university...