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Children’s Use of the Yahooligans! Web Search Engine: I. Cognitive, Physical, and Affective Behaviors on Fact-Based Search Tasks Dania Bilal School of Information Sciences, The University of Tennessee-Knoxville, 804 Volunteer Blvd., Knoxville, TN 37996-4330, E-mail: dania@ This study reports on the first part of a research project 1969), and information needs (Walter, 1994; Goss, 1997) that investigated children’s cognitive, affective, and may impact their information-seeking behavior in IR sys- physical behaviors as they use the Yahooligans! search tems. Use of the Web in schools and the increased access to engine to find information on a specific search task. Twenty-two seventh-grade science children from a mid- the Web by children at home raise many issues concerning dle school located in Knoxville, Tennessee participated information-seeking and use, the roles of school librarians in the project. Their cognitive and physical behaviors and teachers in educating and training, and how well de- were captured using Lotus ScreenCam, a Windows- signers of Web engines provide user-centered interfaces that based software package that captures and replays ac- facilitate children’s information-seeking. tivities recorded in Web browsers, such as Netscape. Their affective states were captured via a one-on-one exit The search engines facilitate seeking information on the interview. A new measure called “Web Traversal Measure” Web. Presently, there are over 500 engines, but only three are was developed to measure children’s “weighted” tra- designed for children: Yahooligans! (http://www.yahooligans. versal effectiveness and efficiency scores, as well as