In order to evaluate the use of natural language, specifically Portuguese, in queries of Web search engines, and to contrast it with queries expressed as keywords we carried out an experiment with students and staff of a Brazilian university. Particularly, this experiment was set up to verify: if users convey well their objectives using keywords; b) how users would convey their objectives using natural language if this option was available in search engines; and c) if queries in natural language would improve information retrieval. The data for this experiment were gathered from the response to a consultation via e-mail to students and staff of a Computing Institute of the university (the e-mail message was sent to about 440 people). We gathered 63 queries which corresponded to 42 objectives. The results may be summarized as follows: for item a, most queries (71,43%), using keywords do not bring all the information regarded as important; for item b, the queries were conveyed as questions (71,87%), statements (18,75%) and orders (9,37%); and for item c, all the direct questions made explicit the objective using only the first word of the sentence or using two or three words, except in the case of which-type questions.
Log analysis; Search engines; Information retrieval; Users´; behavior; Search strategies
