Search (34 results, page 1 of 2)

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Abstract

Collaborative information behavior is an essential aspect of organizational work; however, we have very limited understanding of this behavior. Most models of information behavior focus on the individual seeker of information. In this paper, we report the results from two empirical studies that investigate aspects of collaborative information behavior in organizational settings. From these studies, we found that collaborative information behavior differs from individual information behavior with respect to how individuals interact with each other, the complexity of the information need, and the role of information technology. There are specific triggers for transitioning from individual to collaborative information behavior, including lack of domain expertise. The information retrieval technologies used affect collaborative information behavior by acting as important supporting mechanisms. From these results and prior work, we develop a model of collaborative information behavior along the axes of participant behavior, situational elements, and contextual triggers. We also present characteristics of collaborative information system including search, chat, and sharing. We discuss implications for the design of collaborative information retrieval systems and directions for future work.

Source

Information processing and management. 44(2008) no.1, S.256-273

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Abstract

In this article, we identify, compare, and contrast theoretical constructs for the fields of information searching and information retrieval to emphasize the uniqueness of and synergy between the fields. Theoretical constructs are the foundational elements that underpin a field's core theories, models, assumptions, methodologies, and evaluation metrics. We provide a framework to compare and contrast the theoretical constructs in the fields of information searching and information retrieval using intellectual perspective and theoretical orientation. The intellectual perspectives are information searching, information retrieval, and cross-cutting; and the theoretical orientations are information, people, and technology. Using this framework, we identify 17 significant constructs in these fields contrasting the differences and comparing the similarities. We discuss the impact of the interplay among these constructs for moving research forward within both fields. Although there is tension between the fields due to contradictory constructs, an examination shows a trend toward convergence. We discuss the implications for future research within the information searching and information retrieval fields.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 61(2010) no.8, S.1517-1534

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Abstract

In this research, we investigated whether a learning process has unique information searching characteristics. The results of this research show that information searching is a learning process with unique searching characteristics specific to particular learning levels. In a laboratory experiment, we studied the searching characteristics of 72 participants engaged in 426 searching tasks. We classified the searching tasks according to Anderson and Krathwohl's taxonomy of the cognitive learning domain. Research results indicate that applying and analyzing, the middle two of the six categories, generally take the most searching effort in terms of queries per session, topics searched per session, and total time searching. Interestingly, the lowest two learning categories, remembering and understanding, exhibit searching characteristics similar to the highest order learning categories of evaluating and creating. Our results suggest the view of Web searchers having simple information needs may be incorrect. Instead, we discovered that users applied simple searching expressions to support their higher-level information needs. It appears that searchers rely primarily on their internal knowledge for evaluating and creating information needs, using search primarily for fact checking and verification. Overall, results indicate that a learning theory may better describe the information searching process than more commonly used paradigms of decision making or problem solving. The learning style of the searcher does have some moderating effect on exhibited searching characteristics. The implication of this research is that rather than solely addressing a searcher's expressed information need, searching systems can also address the underlying learning need of the user.

Source

Information processing and management. 45(2009) no.6, S.643-663

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Abstract

A user's single session with a Web search engine or information retrieval (IR) system may consist of seeking information on single or multiple topics, and switch between tasks or multitasking information behavior. Most Web search sessions consist of two queries of approximately two words. However, some Web search sessions consist of three or more queries. We present findings from two studies. First, a study of two-query search sessions on the AltaVista Web search engine, and second, a study of three or more query search sessions on the AltaVista Web search engine. We examine the degree of multitasking search and information task switching during these two sets of AltaVista Web search sessions. A sample of two-query and three or more query sessions were filtered from AltaVista transaction logs from 2002 and qualitatively analyzed. Sessions ranged in duration from less than a minute to a few hours. Findings include: (1) 81% of two-query sessions included multiple topics, (2) 91.3% of three or more query sessions included multiple topics, (3) there are a broad variety of topics in multitasking search sessions, and (4) three or more query sessions sometimes contained frequent topic changes. Multitasking is found to be a growing element in Web searching. This paper proposes an approach to interactive information retrieval (IR) contextually within a multitasking framework. The implications of our findings for Web design and further research are discussed.

Source

Information processing and management. 42(2006) no.1, S.264-275

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Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and technology. 52(2001) no.12, S.1073-1074

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Source

Information processing and management. 36(2000) no.2, S.207-227

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Abstract

Major Web search engines, such as AItaVista, are essential tools in the quest to locate online information. This article reports research that used transaction log analysis to examine the characteristics and changes in AItaVista Web searching that occurred from 1998 to 2002. The research questions we examined are (1) What are the changes in AItaVista Web searching from 1998 to 2002? (2) What are the current characteristics of AItaVista searching, including the duration and frequency of search sessions? (3) What changes in the information needs of AItaVista users occurred between 1998 and 2002? The results of our research show (1) a move toward more interactivity with increases in session and query length, (2) with 70% of session durations at 5 minutes or less, the frequency of interaction is increasing, but it is happening very quickly, and (3) a broadening range of Web searchers' information needs, with the most frequent terms accounting for less than 1% of total term usage. We discuss the implications of these findings for the development of Web search engines.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 56(2005) no.6, S.559-570

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Abstract

The Web is a communication and information technology that is often used for the distribution and retrieval of personal information. Many people and organizations mount Web sites containing large amounts of information on individuals, particularly about celebrities. However, limited studies have examined how people search for information on other people, using personal names, via Web search engines. Explores the nature of personal name searching on Web search engines. The specific research questions addressed in the study are: "Do personal names form a major part of queries to Web search engines?"; "What are the characteristics of personal name Web searching?"; and "How effective is personal name Web searching?". Random samples of queries from two Web search engines were analyzed. The findings show that: personal name searching is a common but not a major part of Web searching with few people seeking information on celebrities via Web search engines; few personal name queries include double quotations or additional identifying terms; and name searches on Alta Vista included more advanced search features relative to those on AlltheWeb.com. Discusses the implications of the findings for Web searching and search engines, and further research.

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Abstract

The Web has become a worldwide source of information and a mainstream business tool. It is changing the way people conduct the daily business of their lives. As these changes are occurring, we need to understand what Web searching trends are emerging within the various global regions. What are the regional differences and trends in Web searching, if any? What is the effectiveness of Web search engines as providers of information? As part of a body of research studying these questions, we have analyzed two data sets collected from queries by mainly European users submitted to AlltheWeb.com on 6 February 2001 and 28 May 2002. AlltheWeb.com is a major and highly rated European search engine. Each data set contains approximately a million queries submitted by over 200,000 users and spans a 24-h period. This longitudinal benchmark study shows that European Web searching is evolving in certain directions. There was some decline in query length, with extremely simple queries. European search topics are broadening, with a notable percentage decline in sexual and pornographic searching. The majority of Web searchers view fewer than five Web documents, spending only seconds on a Web document. Approximately 50% of the Web documents viewed by these European users were topically relevant. We discuss the implications for Web information systems and information content providers.

Source

Information processing and management. 41(2005) no.2, S.361-382

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Abstract

Searchers seldom make use of the advanced searching features that could improve the quality of the search process because they do not know these features exist, do not understand how to use them, or do not believe they are effective or efficient. Information retrieval systems offering automated assistance could greatly improve search effectiveness by suggesting or implementing assistance automatically. A critical issue in designing such systems is determining when the system should intervene in the search process. In this paper, we report the results of an empirical study analyzing when during the search process users seek automated searching assistance from the system and when they implement the assistance. We designed a fully functional, automated assistance application and conducted a study with 30 subjects interacting with the system. The study used a 2G TREC document collection and TREC topics. Approximately 50% of the subjects sought assistance, and over 80% of those implemented that assistance. Results from the evaluation indicate that users are willing to accept automated assistance during the search process, especially after viewing results and locating relevant documents. We discuss implications for interactive information retrieval system design and directions for future research.

Source

Information processing and management. 41(2005) no.4, S.909-928

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Abstract

In this article, we report results of an investigation into the effect of sponsored links on ecommerce information seeking on the Web. In this research, 56 participants each engaged in six ecommerce Web searching tasks. We extracted these tasks from the transaction log of a Web search engine, so they represent actual ecommerce searching information needs. Using 60 organic and 30 sponsored Web links, the quality of the Web search engine results was controlled by switching nonsponsored and sponsored links on half of the tasks for each participant. This allowed for investigating the bias toward sponsored links while controlling for quality of content. The study also investigated the relationship between searching self-efficacy, searching experience, types of ecommerce information needs, and the order of links on the viewing of sponsored links. Data included 2,453 interactions with links from result pages and 961 utterances evaluating these links. The results of the study indicate that there is a strong preference for nonsponsored links, with searchers viewing these results first more than 82% of the time. Searching self-efficacy and experience does not increase the likelihood of viewing sponsored links, and the order of the result listing does not appear to affect searcher evaluation of sponsored links. The implications for sponsored links as a long-term business model are discussed.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 57(2006) no.14, S.1949-1961

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Abstract

Many people turn to their social networks to find information through the practice of question and answering. We believe it is necessary to use different answering strategies based on the type of questions to accommodate the different information needs. In this research, we propose the ASK taxonomy that categorizes questions posted on social networking sites into three types according to the nature of the questioner's inquiry of accuracy, social, or knowledge. To automatically decide which answering strategy to use, we develop a predictive model based on ASK question types using question features from the perspectives of lexical, topical, contextual, and syntactic as well as answer features. By applying the classifier on an annotated data set, we present a comprehensive analysis to compare questions in terms of their word usage, topical interests, temporal and spatial restrictions, syntactic structure, and response characteristics. Our research results show that the three types of questions exhibited different characteristics in the way they are asked. Our automatic classification algorithm achieves an 83% correct labeling result, showing the value of the ASK taxonomy for the design of social question and answering systems.

Source

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 68(2017) no.2, S.333-347

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Abstract

Jansen and Pooch review three major search engine studies and compare them to three traditional search system studies and three OPAC search studies, to determine if user search characteristics differ. The web search engine studies indicate that most searchers use two, two search term queries per session, no boolean operators, and look only at the top ten items returned, while reporting the location of relevant information. In traditional search systems we find seven to 16 queries of six to nine terms, while about ten documents per session were viewed. The OPAC studies indicated two to five queries per session of two or less terms, with Boolean search about 1% and less than 50 documents viewed.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and technology. 52(2001) no.3, S.235-246

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Abstract

We report quantitative and qualitative results of an empirical evaluation to determine whether automated assistance improves searching performance and when searchers desire system intervention in the search process. Forty participants interacted with two fully functional information retrieval systems in a counterbalanced, within-participant study. The systems were identical in all respects except that one offered automated assistance and the other did not. The study used a client-side automated assistance application, an approximately 500,000-document Text REtrieval Conference content collection, and six topics. Results indicate that automated assistance can improve searching performance. However, the improvement is less dramatic than one might expect, with an approximately 20% performance increase, as measured by the number of userselected relevant documents. Concerning patterns of interaction, we identified 1,879 occurrences of searchersystem interactions and classified them into 9 major categories and 27 subcategories or states. Results indicate that there are predictable patterns of times when searchers desire and implement searching assistance. The most common three-state pattern is Execute Query-View Results: With Scrolling-View Assistance. Searchers appear receptive to automated assistance; there is a 71% implementation rate. There does not seem to be a correlation between the use of assistance and previous searching performance. We discuss the implications for the design of information retrieval systems and future research directions.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 56(2005) no.14, S.1480-1503

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Abstract

In previous articles, we reported the state of Web searching in 1997 (Jansen, Spink, & Saracevic, 2000) and in 1999 (Spink, Wolfram, Jansen, & Saracevic, 2001). Such snapshot studies and statistics on Web use appear regularly (OCLC, 1999), but provide little information about Web searching trends. In this article, we compare and contrast results from our two previous studies of Excite queries' data sets, each containing over 1 million queries submitted by over 200,000 Excite users collected on 16 September 1997 and 20 December 1999. We examine how public Web searching changing during that 2-year time period. As Table 1 shows, the overall structure of Web queries in some areas did not change, while in others we see change from 1997 to 1999. Our comparison shows how Web searching changed incrementally and also dramatically. We see some moves toward greater simplicity, including shorter queries (i.e., fewer terms) and shorter sessions (i.e., fewer queries per user), with little modification (addition or deletion) of terms in subsequent queries. The trend toward shorter queries suggests that Web information content should target specific terms in order to reach Web users. Another trend was to view fewer pages of results per query. Most Excite users examined only one page of results per query, since an Excite results page contains ten ranked Web sites. Were users satisfied with the results and did not need to view more pages? It appears that the public continues to have a low tolerance of wading through retrieved sites. This decline in interactivity levels is a disturbing finding for the future of Web searching. Queries that included Boolean operators were in the minority, but the percentage increased between the two time periods. Most Boolean use involved the AND operator with many mistakes. The use of relevance feedback almost doubled from 1997 to 1999, but overall use was still small. An unusually large number of terms were used with low frequency, such as personal names, spelling errors, non-English words, and Web-specific terms, such as URLs. Web query vocabulary contains more words than found in large English texts in general. The public language of Web queries has its own and unique characteristics. How did Web searching topics change from 1997 to 1999? We classified a random sample of 2,414 queries from 1997 and 2,539 queries from 1999 into 11 categories (Table 2). From 1997 to 1999, Web searching shifted from entertainment, recreation and sex, and pornography, preferences to e-commerce-related topics under commerce, travel, employment, and economy. This shift coincided with changes in information distribution on the publicly indexed Web.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and technology. 52(2001) no.3, S.226-234

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Abstract

The application of clustering to Web search engine technology is a novel approach that offers structure to the information deluge often faced by Web searchers. Clustering methods have been well studied in research labs; however, real user searching with clustering systems in operational Web environments is not well understood. This article reports on results from a transaction log analysis of Vivisimo.com, which is a Web meta-search engine that dynamically clusters users' search results. A transaction log analysis was conducted on 2-week's worth of data collected from March 28 to April 4 and April 25 to May 2, 2004, representing 100% of site traffic during these periods and 2,029,734 queries overall. The results show that the highest percentage of queries contained two terms. The highest percentage of search sessions contained one query and was less than 1 minute in duration. Almost half of user interactions with clusters consisted of displaying a cluster's result set, and a small percentage of interactions showed cluster tree expansion. Findings show that 11.1% of search sessions were multitasking searches, and there are a broad variety of search topics in multitasking search sessions. Other searching interactions and statistics on repeat users of the search engine are reported. These results provide insights into search characteristics with a cluster-based Web search engine and extend research into Web searching trends.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 57(2006) no.14, S.1875-1887

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Abstract

Metasearch engines are an intuitive method for improving the performance of Web search by increasing coverage, returning large numbers of results with a focus on relevance, and presenting alternative views of information needs. However, the use of metasearch engines in an operational environment is not well understood. In this study, we investigate the usage of Dogpile.com, a major Web metasearch engine, with the aim of discovering how Web searchers interact with metasearch engines. We report results examining 2,465,145 interactions from 534,507 users of Dogpile.com on May 6, 2005 and compare these results with findings from other Web searching studies. We collect data on geographical location of searchers, use of system feedback, content selection, sessions, queries, and term usage. Findings show that Dogpile.com searchers are mainly from the USA (84% of searchers), use about 3 terms per query (mean = 2.85), implement system feedback moderately (8.4% of users), and generally (56% of users) spend less than one minute interacting with the Web search engine. Overall, metasearchers seem to have higher degrees of interaction than searchers on non-metasearch engines, but their sessions are for a shorter period of time. These aspects of metasearching may be what define the differences from other forms of Web searching. We discuss the implications of our findings in relation to metasearch for Web searchers, search engines, and content providers.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 58(2007) no.5, S.744-755

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Abstract

The Web and especially major Web search engines are essential tools in the quest to locate online information for many people. This paper reports results from research that examines characteristics and changes in Web searching from nine studies of five Web search engines based in the US and Europe. We compare interactions occurring between users and Web search engines from the perspectives of session length, query length, query complexity, and content viewed among the Web search engines. The results of our research shows (1) users are viewing fewer result pages, (2) searchers on US-based Web search engines use more query operators than searchers on European-based search engines, (3) there are statistically significant differences in the use of Boolean operators and result pages viewed, and (4) one cannot necessary apply results from studies of one particular Web search engine to another Web search engine. The wide spread use of Web search engines, employment of simple queries, and decreased viewing of result pages may have resulted from algorithmic enhancements by Web search engine companies. We discuss the implications of the findings for the development of Web search engines and design of online content.

Source

Information processing and management. 42(2006) no.1, S.248-263

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Abstract

Purpose - The purpose of this paper is to examine the way in which end user searching on the web has become the primary method of locating digital images for many people. This paper seeks to investigate how users structure these image queries. Design/methodology/approach - This study investigates the structure and formation of image queries on the web by mapping a sample of web queries to three known query classification schemes for image searching (i.e. Enser and McGregor, Jörgensen, and Chen). Findings - The results indicate that the features and attributes of web image queries differ relative to image queries utilized on other information retrieval systems and by other user populations. This research points to the need for five additional attributes (i.e. collections, pornography, presentation, URL, and cost) in order to classify web image queries, which were not present in any of the three prior classification schemes. Research limitations/implications - Patterns in web searching for image content do emerge that inform the design of web-based multimedia systems, namely, that there is a high interest in locating image collections by web searchers. Objects and people images are the predominant interest for web searchers. Cost is a factor for web searching. This knowledge of the structure of web image queries has implications for the design of image information retrieval systems and repositories, especially in the area of automatic tagging of images with metadata. Originality/value - This is the first research that examines whether or not one can apply image query classifications schemes to web image queries.

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Abstract

Searching for multimedia is an important activity for users of Web search engines. Studying user's interactions with Web search engine multimedia buttons, including image, audio, and video, is important for the development of multimedia Web search systems. This article provides results from a Weblog analysis study of multimedia Web searching by Dogpile users in 2006. The study analyzes the (a) duration, size, and structure of Web search queries and sessions; (b) user demographics; (c) most popular multimedia Web searching terms; and (d) use of advanced Web search techniques including Boolean and natural language. The current study findings are compared with results from previous multimedia Web searching studies. The key findings are: (a) Since 1997, image search consistently is the dominant media type searched followed by audio and video; (b) multimedia search duration is still short (>50% of searching episodes are <1 min), using few search terms; (c) many multimedia searches are for information about people, especially in audio search; and (d) multimedia search has begun to shift from entertainment to other categories such as medical, sports, and technology (based on the most repeated terms). Implications for design of Web multimedia search engines are discussed.

Source

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. 60(2009) no.9, S.1756-1768