Browsing by Author "Osherson, Daniel N."

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    How users determine the quality of a Web page
    (2003) Dudziak, Karin Quinones; Osherson, Daniel N.
    The World Wide Web and search engines are widely used, and getting good results from searches is important. Research has shown that there are measurable, quantitative features of Web pages that relate to the quality of the Web page. There is little existing research that has examined a set of Web pages, rated by representative users, to determine what Web page features may predict users' ratings about the quality of the pages. This is the first study to apply policy capturing, a methodology to capture the cues people use in making judgments or ratings, to determine how a group of representative users made judgments about various Web pages. Search engines could utilize these features in examining Web pages to provide more useful results. The features of the Web pages examined were page length, links, images, keywords per page, and keywords per title. Users rated 40 Web pages on the relevancy, ease of understanding, and trustworthiness of the page in three separate topic areas. Analyses included the amount of variance accounted for, weighting of individual cues, complexity of the decision process, participants' insight into their own rating methodology, and the role of individual difference variables. Free response data were gathered about what other features influenced participants' ratings. Overall, average ratings on the three dependent variables ranged from 60--70 out of 100. The beta weights and R2 for the independent variables were low to moderate. Keywords were shown to be an important predictor in the page or title depending on the topic area. Links and images were more important for noninformation-centric topics. Most people used one of the five linear cues significantly, and more complex, nonlinear relationships were also found. For example, keywords increased the value of a page up to a point, but beyond that point the benefit decreased (a quadratic relationship). The amount of insight into how decisions were made about pages varied among participants from none to nearly perfect. Many of the variables and results varied significantly by topic area. Policy capturing is a good methodology for examining this issue, but additional Web page features should be tested.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The conjunction fallacy under probability and betting instructions
    (2000) Sides, Ashley Ellen; Osherson, Daniel N.
    Researchers have tried to keep subjects from committing the conjunction fallacy since Tversky and Kahneman discovered it in 1983. Betting paradigms (Bar-Hillel, 1993) have been used to force subjects to use a mathematical interpretation of "probability", but past experiments have either not involved actual betting or have had subjects bet on fictitious situations. In the current experiments half of the subjects were asked to decide which of 2 statements (about future events) had a higher probability while the other half were asked which statement they would prefer to bet on (in view of an actual payoff). The hypothesis was that while subjects in the probability condition would commit the conjunction fallacy, those in the betting condition would not. This hypothesis was not supported---there was not a significant difference between the numbers of conjunction fallacies committed by subjects in the two conditions in either of two experiments.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The psychological fidelity of Web search engines
    (2000) Dudziak, Karin Quinones; Osherson, Daniel N.
    Web search engines are the primary method for finding information in the vast World Wide Web, yet little empirical research of them has been conducted. This study examined how well search engines' relevancy ratings of Web sites matched users' ratings. Eighty-one people rated Web sites in three different topic areas that were delivered as top sites by Infoseek and/or HotBot. To ensure fair ratings, participants were unaware of the ratings assigned by the search engines, or even that search engines had generated the sites. Individual difference characteristics of the raters (e.g., browser-searcher, level of knowledge and interest in topic) were also collected. Agreement as to the top sites was quite low among search engines. However, people showed very high levels of agreement and reliability. Search engines' ratings did not correspond well with the raters' ratings. Nevertheless, Infoseek performed better than HotBot on every measure of agreement with user ratings.