Factors Affecting User Satisfaction with Search Engines: Survey Based Approach

Abstract

Today, trillion of pages are published on the web. Traditional search engines, based on exact keyword match, return too many
documents in response to a user query, and most of the returned documents are irrelevant. So web searchers are facing problems like
information overload phenomena. Therefore there is a need to filter the useful information from the excess of information published on the web.
Information overload put users at stress and thereby causing difficulty in searching and filtering useful information. User satisfaction is one of
the most important factors to measure the success of search engines. It is the key variable in the search process where the information that has
been obtained is evaluated and utilized by the information seeker. In this paper we have analyze that there is a need for identifying the factors
affecting user satisfaction with search engine and proposed a model comprises of various factor that affect user search satisfaction. Based upon
the proposed model we have conducted a survey and have identified major factors namely up-to-date information, Search Result relevancy,
Response Time and Reliability contributing to the user satisfaction which may further be used as guideline for accessing the information through
search engine.

Keywords: Search Engine, User Interface, Response Time, Diversity and Freshness, long tail, geographic information.