No abstract

Exploratory search activities tend to span multiple sessions and involve finding, analyzing and evaluating information found through many queries. Typical search systems, on the other hand, are designed to support single query, precision-oriented search tasks. We describe a search interface and system design of a multisession exploratory search system, discuss design challenges encountered, and chronicle the evolution of our design. Our design describes novel displays for visualizing retrieval history information, and introduces ambient displays and persuasive elements to interactive information retrieval.

People often use more than one query when searching for information. They revisit search results to re-find information and build an understanding of their search need through iterative explorations of query formulation. These tasks are not wellsupported by search interfaces and web browsers. We designed and built SearchPanel, a Chrome browser extension that supports people in their ongoing information seeking. This extension combines document and process metadata into an interactive representation of the retrieved documents that can be used for sense-making, navigation, and re-finding documents. In a realworld deployment spanning over two months, results show that SearchPanel appears to have been primarily used for complex information needs, in search sessions with long durations and high numbers of queries. When process metadata was present in the UI, searchers in explorative search sessions submitted more and longer queries and interacted more with the SERP. These results indicate that the process metadata features in SearchPanel seem to be of particular importance for exploratory search.

No abstract

Exploratory search is a complex, iterative information seeking activity that involves running multiple queries and finding and examining many documents. We designed a query preview control that visualizes the distribution of newly-retrieved and reretrieved documents prior to running the query. When evaluating the preview control with a control condition, we found effects on both people's information seeking behavior and improved retrieval performance. People spent more time formulating a query and were more likely to explore search results more deeply, retrieved a more diverse set of documents, and found more different relevant documents when using the preview.