World Wide Web (WWW) is information rich enviroment. The access and document posted on WWW has rapidly grown since it was popularized in 1990s. The abundance of information on WWW cause information overload problem,where users find hard to filter and select information return by the seacrh system. Moreover,the growth of the new inexperienced users creates new challenges for information retrieval researchers. It has become increaingly difficult for these users to find relevant documents that satisfying their information need. This problem is due to the fact that this category of user is unable to express his exact need of information which leads to the use of inappropriate keywords or queries. This paper presents a study of the user searching behavior on query formulation. In this paper,query formulation is divided into two categories; breadth and depth query strategies. The findings of this study show that breadth query strategy is the most popular strategy.
Keywords: Web searching; search behaviour; information retrieval; search strategy.
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