Abstract

Information Technologies shape the way users retrieve information. The Internet has become one of the most important information resources where people look for various kind of information. Search engines are seen as a gateway to the online information. This paper describes a survey carried out on graduate students pursing Master or PhD to investigate the impact of search engines on their research process. Information quality, cost and copyright issue were examined to give an insight on how Internet was used as an information source. Overall, quality of information and time spent were the main influences when using search engines. Students are generally aware of copyright issues. However, most of them do not check copyright issue when downloading online materials. Nearly half of the participants also agree that search engines are biased towards English.

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