BACKGROUND Awareness and use of electronic cigarettes has rapidly grown in the USA recently, in step with increased product marketing. Using responses to a population survey of US adults, we analysed demographic patterns of exposure to, searching for and sharing of e-cigarette-related information across media platforms. METHODS An online survey of 17,522 US adults was conducted in 2013. The n...

We propose to study intimate relationship formation and development on a massive scale, making use of a very large online personals website. The sheer quantity of people and interactions in a large online dating system allow for studies with great statistical and ecological validity, since such a system is the real environment in which millions of people are searching for long-term romantic par...

The Internet has become an important source of health information and support. It is estimated that 80% of Internet users in the USA look for health information online, representing 59% of all adult Americans. Among people aged 18-29 these figures rise to 92% of individuals online, and 71% of all individuals, who will seek health information online [4]. After e-mail and the use of search engine...

A crucial component to using the Web satisfactorily is locating what one is looking for. The paper begins with a description of some of the cognitive and affective characteristics of children and teenagers that may affect their searching behavior. It reviews some of the literature on children’s searching in online public access catalogs (OPACs) and using digital libraries. The focus of the pape...

We construct an agent-based model of the online electronics market, consisting of 10,000 buyers and 50 sellers. Buyers repeatedly interact with sellers, searching for high quality and low price, but only some buyers know seller quality prior to purchase. Buyers may learn seller quality directly or from information obtained from other buyers or else estimate quality through market share heuristi...

The number of ontologies available online is increasing constantly. Tools that are capable of searching, retrieving, and ranking ontologies are becoming crucial to facilitate ontology search and reuse. In this document, we describe OntoSearch, which is a tool for capturing and searching ontologies on the Semantic web. We also briefly describe AKTiveRank which is used to rank OWL ontologies base...

In this paper we present a Basic Bioinformatics Meta-searcher (BBMS), a web-based service aiming to simplify and integrate biological data searching through selected biological databases. BBMS facilitates biological data searching enabling multiple sources transparently, increasing research productivity as it avoids time consuming learning and parameterization of different search engines. As a ...

This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of topic familiarity on the assessment behaviour of online searchers. In particular we investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the resources and relevance criteria used by searchers. Our results indicate that searching on an unfamiliar topic leads to use of more generic and fewer specialised resources and that searchers employ diffe...

As non-English-speaking online populations grow rapidly, there are increasing needs to support searching for non-English Web content. Prior research has assumed English to be the primary language for Web searching, but this is not the case for many non-English-speaking regions. For example, Latin America will have the fastest growing population in the coming decades but existing Spanish search ...