  More and more people use the Internet to work on duties of their daily work
routine. To find the right information online, Web search engines are the tools
of their choice. Apart from finding facts, people use Web search engines to
also execute rather complex and time consuming search tasks. So far search
engines follow the one-for-all approach to serve its users and little is known
about the impact of gender and age on people's Web search behavior. In this
article we present a study that examines (1) how female and male web users
carry out simple and complex search tasks and what are the differences between
the two user groups, and (2) how the age of the users impacts their search
performance. The laboratory study was done with 56 ordinary people each
carrying out 12 search tasks. Our findings confirm that age impacts behavior
and search performance significantly, while gender influences were smaller than
expected.
