How do older and young adults start searching for information? Impact of age, domain knowledge and problem complexity on the different steps of information searching

International audienceThe present study addressed the age-related differences in query production and information searchingperformance when interacting with a search engine. To this end, 20 older adults and 20 young onesperformed 12 information search problems of varying complexity in two knowledge domains (healthand fantastic movies). Participants had simple (useful keywords provided and answer directly accessiblein Google), inferential (inferences to produce useful keywords required) and multicriteria problems(information gathering and navigation required). Results showed that older adults produced their firstquery with more keywords extracted from the search problem statements and spent more time on thesearch engine pages than young ones. In the fantastic movies, older adults struggled more than youngones and had difficulties reformulating their queries (i.e. fewer new keywords produced, more statementprovided keywords). Older adults especially struggled at the beginning of the search (more time spent onthe first search engine result page than young ones and they produced less elaborate initial query). Incontrast, in the health domain, higher prior knowledge helped older users reformulate queries that weremore elaborated (i.e.no age-related differences on the number of new keywords) and improved theprocessing of the first search engine page consulted