Experienced web users have strategies for information search and re-access that are not directly supported by web browsers or search engines. We studied how prevalent these strategies are and whether even experienced users have problems with searching and re-accessing information. With this aim, we conducted a survey with 236 experienced web users. The results showed that this group has frequently used key strategies (e.g., using several browser windows in parallel) that they find important, whereas some of the strategies that have been suggested in previous studies are clearly less important for them (e.g., including URLs on a webpage). In some aspects, such as query formulation, this group resembles less experienced web users. For instance, we found that most of the respondents had misconceptions about how their search engine handles queries, as well as other problems with information search and re-access. In addition to presenting the prevalence of the strategies and rationales for their use, we present concrete designs solutions and ideas for making the key strategies also available to less experienced users.

Conducting research using the web is often an iterative process of collecting, comparing and contrasting information. Not surprisingly, web-based research tasks habitually span multiple web sessions and involve considerable web page revisitation. Such tasks are not only carried out by researchers, but also by casual web users who, for example, plan vacations and large purchases. Despite the prominence of this activity among web users, existing tools support it poorly. We propose an alternative approach, whereby web-based research tasks are facilitated by a web workspace which represents collected URLs with web page thumbnails. A prototype of our design was developed and studied in an evaluation with 12 participants. Each of the participants adopted the workspace approach instinctively: the workspace was used for web page revisitation, web page comparison, collection overview, cross-session task continuation, and continuous task focus.

The result lists of popular web search engines represent retrieved documents with a title, a brief textual summary and a URL. Wepresent a novel approach that incorporates visualization into the conventional search result interface. For each resulting document, occurrences of the entire are concisely depicted in the form of a small, document-shaped icon. An participant user study was carried out to compare our design with the traditional search result list in terms of accuracy and task performance. Though statistically in were not observed, the participants' subjective ratings and opinions of the visualization's utility were positive. Despite the fact that the visualization introduces a new and somewhat complicated variable to consider when evaluating search result lists, the participants performance did not fall below their performance level with the traditional interface. Our findings indicate the need to study such interfaces in a longitudinal setting.