| Summary: | Searching for information pervades a wide spectrum of human activity, including learning and problem solving. With recent changes in the amount of information available and the variety of means of retrieval, there is even more need to understand why some searchers are more successful than others. This study was undertaken to advance our understanding of expertise in seeking information on the Web by identifying strategies and attributes that will increase the chance of a successful search on the Web. A model that illustrated the relationship between strategies and attributes and a successful search was also created. The strategies were: Evaluation, Navigation, Affect, Metacognition, Cognition, and Prior knowledge. Attributes included Age, Sex, Years of experience, Computer knowledge, and Info-seeking knowledge. Success was defined as finding a target topic within 30 minutes. Participants were from three groups. Novices were 10 undergraduate pre-service teachers who were trained in pedagogy but not specifically in information seeking. Intermediates were nine final-year master's students who had received training on how to search but typically had not put heir knowledge into extensive practice. Experts were 10 highly experienced professional librarians working in a variety of settings including government, industry, and university. Participants' verbal protocols were transcribed verbatim into a text file and coded. These codes, along with Internet temporary files, a background questionnaire, and a post-task interview were the sources of the data. Since the variable of interest was the time to finding the topic, in addition to ANOVA and Pearson correlation, survival analysis was used to explore the data. The most significant differences in patterns of search between novices and experts were found in the Cognitive, Metacognitive, and Prior Knowledge strategies. Based on the fitted survival model, Typing Keyword, Criteria to evaluate sites, and Information-Seeking Kno
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