Influenced by existing beliefs, people are often biased in favor of information that supports their attitudes, intensifying the information cocoon effect. To break information cocoon and promote open-minded searches, it is important to guide seekers to approach to conflicting information and formulate critical thinking. This study aimed to examine when and why people actively seek conflicting information using grounded theory. Specifically, we interviewed 13 people who have experiences of actively seeking conflicting information. All the transcript data were coded for analysis. The results demonstrated that context, user characteristics, and motivation were the three main factors that led users to seek conflicting information actively and influenced seekers' preferences of information. Finally, we define this type of search tasks as "attitude tasks," and call for more attention on this type of tasks.

Contextual factors have been found to be an important factor in information searching behaviors, however, little attention has been paid to the influence of contextual factors on users’ query typing behaviors. This study aims to explore the influence of two different contextual factors (with or without time constraint and two kinds of task type) on users’ query typing behaviors. We recruited 40 college students and conducted a user experiment, in which each participant completed two types of search tasks (Fact Finding and Information Understanding) in two different time conditions. The results show that time constraint encourages users to increase their query typing speed. Furthermore, the task type affects query length and rate of keystroke errors.