SEARCHING THROUGH CYBERSPACE - THE EFFECTS OF LINK DISPLAY AND LINK DENSITY ON INFORMATION-RETRIEVAL FROM HYPERTEXT ON THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB

This study investigated information retrieval from hypertext on Intern et's World Wide Web (WWW), Significant main and interaction effects we re found for both link density (number of links per display) and displ ay format (in paragraphs or lists) on search performance, Low link den sities displayed in list format produced the best overall results, in terms of search accuracy, search time, number of links explored, and s earch task prioritization. Lowell densities affected user ability to p rioritize search tasks:and produced more accurate searches, while list displays positively affected all aspects of searching except task pri oritization. The performance of novices and experts, in terms of their previous experience browsing hypertext on the WWW, was compared. Expe rts performed better, mostly because of their superior task prioritiza tion.