| Google Yourself! Measuring the performance of personalized information resources (2008) | |||||||||||
Abstract | |||||||||||
| The practice described as »Self-Googling« can be seen as a form of narcissism, which may help to explain the phenomenon of people searching and browsing the Web for information about themselves. Egosurfing, Egogoogling, Self-Marketing or Vanity Searching are different names for the same practice of harnessing the Internet's vast data-collection powers to dig up information about oneself, as Glasner (2001) puts it. In addition to using the theory of narcissism to explain the »Self-Googling« phenomenon, however, this practice can also be seen as a social construction of personal reputation in terms of Self-Marketing (Lampel et al. 2007). There have been previous attempts to explain and analyse the search behaviour of users, which fall into three distinct categories: (1) those that primarily use transaction-log analysis, (2) those that involve users in a laboratory survey or other experimental setting, and (3) those that examine issues related to or affecting Web searching (Jansen et al. 2006; Spink et al. 2004). Our research methodology and the presented results clearly belong to the first category. However, none of the previous attempts made an explicit differentiation between generic search term keywords and personal names. Only a vague category of people, places or things has previously been analysed by Jansen et al. (2006) showing a growth of search terms in that category from 21.5% of all search terms in 2001 to 41.5% in 2002. This paper addresses this gap in the available research by more specifically comparing search and click-through trends for personalised information resources (Web pages and sites which refer specifically to individual persons, and whose URIs include a version of the persons name) and non-personalised information resources (pages and sites which are not name-specific, and have more generic URIs). In particular, it examines whether generic search terms or personal names as search terms produce a better click-through performance. This throws new light on the »Self-Googling« phenomenon and provides a basis for further research. | |||||||||||
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Literaturangaben in der Publikation (2) | |||||||||||
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