Searching and finding items on the WWW is increasingly difficult for businesses and for consumers. Many navigation and keyword searches are inadequate for the modern consumer. What’s plaguing e-commerce is the lack of intelligent assistance. The e-Salesman System (eSS) [11], based on a knowledgedriven intelligent model, aims to simulate the human element of traditional shopping for online sales...

AESTRACT CHILDREN ARE INCREASINGLY GAINING access to digitized information through many media-nline catalogs, CD-ROMs, online services, and the Internet. Using these tools to find the desired information can be challenging, as research has shown with adult searchers of online catalogs and online databases. Searching these electronic information sources requires a different set of search strateg...

The idea of “information commitments” refers to both learners’ online searching strategies and the evaluative standards that students use to assess the accuracy and usefulness of information in web-based learning environments. Based upon the results of a pioneering and qualitative study on information commitments, this study aimed to develop an Information Commitments Survey (ICS) for assessing...

BACKGROUND The rapid growth of online publications such as the Medline and other sources raises the questions how to get the relevant information efficiently. It is important, for a bench scientist, e.g., to monitor related publications constantly. It is also important, for a clinician, e.g., to access the patient records anywhere and anytime. Although time-consuming, this kind of searching pro...