Web searching across languages: Preference and behavior of bilingual academic users in Korea

The problem of language in Web searching has been discussed primarily in the area of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). However, much CLIR research centers on investigation of the effectiveness of automatic translation techniques. The case study reported here explored bilingual user behaviors, perceptions, and preferences with respect to the capability of the Web as a multilingual information resource. Twenty-eight bilingual academic users from Myongji University in Korea were recruited for the study. Findings show that the subjects did not use Web search engines as multilingual tools. For search queries, they selected a language that represents their information need most accurately depending on the types of information task rather than choosing their first language. Subjects expressed concerns about the accuracy of machine translation of scholarly terminologies and preferred to have user control over multilingual Web searches.