1 INTERNET TOPIC SEARCHING MATCHED WITH SEARCH ENGINES TO PROVIDE RELEVANT INFORMATION TO IT/IS STUDENTS – A SOUTH AFRICAN APPROACH. AUTHOR: Melius Weideman, Cape Technikon, Cape Town, South Africa melius@ctech.ac.za P.O. Box 3109, TYGERPARK 7536 SOUTH AFRICA 1 ABSTRACT Some early research has proven that students show a higher level of participation in a class if they are involved in their own evaluation. It has also been proven that they are keen to use the internet to find information relating to their studies. A pilot study was used to build a measuring instrument to be used to determine student’s ability to search for information. A country-wide research tour followed. The instrument was then used to measure various parameters involving the degree of success experienced by students during internet searching. It was found that only 38% of the subjects found the information they were looking for within 30 minutes in a controlled environment. There was also strong evidence that historically disadvantaged students had a lower searching success rate than others. Early versions of a model to assist students in the searching process have shown promise of success. 2 INTRODUCTION 2.1 AIM The aim of this paper is to disseminate the results of research done in South Africa, which involved computer study students searching for subject information on the internet. 2.2 BACKGROUND Information is critical in any organisation (Evans & Wurster 1997:72). IT/IS professionals depend for their survival on the use of information in their daily lives. IS managers consider the process of letting users find information for themselves as liberating to IS staff (Foley 1996:45). The research described in this paper focuses on the retrieval of timely, accurate and relevant information – clearly a crucial component in the lives of would-be IT/IS professionals.