Searching for Islamic and Qur'anic information on the web: A mixed-methods approach

Abstract

This paper seeks to understand and describe web searching patterns for Islamic and Qur'anic information, an area receiving little attention in past research. A mixed-methods approach has been taken to data collection utilizing both quantitative and qualitative techniques. Query logs collected in 2006 from the Microsoft Live search engine were analysed for Islamic-related terms. Characteristics such as query frequency, term frequency, query length, and session length were derived from the data. To complement these quantitative data, interview data were collected from 25 users who had experienced searching for Islamic and/or Qur'anic materials on the web. The interviews gave a deeper understanding of aspects of information seeking including search processes, challenges and opinions on locating Islamic and Qur'anic information on the web. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.