Language-sensitive search behaviour and the role of domain knowledge

Abstract

While many websites aim at a large and linguistically diversified audience, they present their information mostly in the languages of larger speakers groups. Little is known about the effect on accessibility. We investigated the influence of a site's language offer on website access and search behaviour with two studies, and studied the interaction of language offers and domain knowledge. To achieve high ecological validity, we analysed data from a multilingual site's web-server logfile and from a questionnaire posted on it, and compared the behaviour of users who accessed the site in a non-native language to that of users who accessed it in their native language. Results from 277,809 user sessions and 165 international survey participants indicate that a website's languages may strongly reduce website access by users not supplied with information in their native language. Once inside a site, non-native speakers with high domain knowledge behave similarly to native speakers. However, non-native speakers’ behaviour becomes language-sensitive when they have low domain knowledge.

Notes

Parts of Study 1 have been described previously in Kralisch, A., and Berendt, B., Linguistic Determinants of Search Behaviour on websites. In Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Cultural Attitudes Towards Technology and Communication (CATaC 2004), 2004, pp. 599–613.

²The majority of the European users (68%) came from L1 countries and cities.

³These data are coarse-grained – more fine-grained data would require either to ask every Internet user for his/her native language or to derive data from statistics on the distribution of native languages in each country (including immigration and other minority language groups) and the extent to which each language group is represented on the Internet. To our knowledge, such data do not exist at the moment.