M.V.M. Salem et al. (Eds.): AIRS 2011, LNCS 7097, pp. 181–192, 2011. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2011 Searching for Islamic and Qur’anic Information on the Web: A Mixed-Methods Approach Rita Wan-Chik * , Paul Clough, and Nigel Ford The Information School, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom {lip08rzw,p.d.clough,n.ford}@sheffield.ac.uk, ritazaharah@miit.unikl.edu.my 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. Keywords: user studies, interactive IR, information seeking, query log analysis, Islamic and Qur’anic information. 1 Introduction Increasingly the Internet is being used as a common means of transmitting information of a religious nature. Højsgaard and Warburg (2005) reported that by the year 2004, there were approximately 51 million religious websites on the Internet disseminating information and communicating with their followers. A number of further studies have looked at how religions use Internet technologies in disseminating their beliefs (Helland, 2000; Dawson & Cowan, 2004; Karaflogka, 2006). Members of religious communities use the Internet to undertake activities, such as listening to sermons, asking for advice, networking and even shopping for religious merchandise (Helland, 2002; Foltz & Foltz, 2003; Campbell, 2005a; Cheong et al., 2009). An area of increasing interest in the field of information seeking is the study of the relationship between religion and Internet use (Campbell, 2005b; Krueger, 2005). Studies have found that an important component of online religious activities is * Rita Wan-Chik is a lecturer at The Malaysian Institute of Information Technology, Universiti Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.