It is widely known that people become better at an activity if they performthis activity long and often. Yet, the question is whether being active inrelated areas like communicating online, writing blog articles or commenting oncommunity forums have an impact on a persons ability to perform Web searches,is still unanswered. Web searching has become a key task conducted online; inthis paper we present our findings on whether the user type, which categorisesa persons online activities, has an impact on her or his search capabilities.We show (1) the characteristics of different user types when carrying outsimple search tasks; (2) their characteristics when carrying out complex searchtasks; and, (3) the significantly different user type characteristics betweensimple and complex search tasks. The results are based on an experiment with 56ordinary Web users in a laboratory environment. The Search-Logger studyframework was used to analyze and measure user behavior when carrying out a setof 12 predefined search tasks. Our findings include the fact that depending ontask type (simple or complex) significant differences can be observed betweenusers of different types.
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