Strategy hubs: Domain portals to help find comprehensive information

Abstract

Recent studies suggest that the wide variability in type, detail, and reliability of online information motivate expert searchers to develop procedural search knowledge. In contrast to prior research that has focused on finding relevant sources, procedural search knowledge focuses on how to order multiple relevant sources with the goal of retrieving comprehensive information. Because such procedural search knowledge is neither spontaneously inferred from the results of search engines, nor from the categories provided by domainspecific portals, the lack of such knowledge leads most novice searchers to retrieve incomplete information. In domains like healthcare, such incomplete information can lead to dangerous consequences. To address the above problem, a new kind of domain portal called a Strategy Hub was developed and tested. Strategy Hubs provide critical search procedures and associated high-quality links to enable users to find comprehensive and accurate information. We begin by describing how we collaborated with physicians to systematically identify generalizable search procedures to find comprehensive information about a disease, and how these search procedures were made available through the Strategy Hub. A controlled experiment suggests that this approach can improve the ability of novice searchers in finding comprehensive and accurate information, when compared to general-purpose search engines and domain-specific portals. We conclude with insights on how to refine and automate the Strategy Hub design, with the ultimate goal of helping users find more comprehensive information when searching in unfamiliar domains.

Characterizing the influence of domain expertise on web search behavior

“…Bhavnani et al's work on Strategy Hubs [5] is an example of a system that supports and educates non-experts by providing critical search procedures and associated high-quality links. We believe that providing such support could be extended more broadly.…”

“…Novices, in contrast, went to a general search engine and examined a few items in the results list, often terminating their session before identifying good sites or thorough information. Using these insights they developed a search system, Strategy Hubs, to provide support for novices to identify comprehensive information from high-quality sites in the medical domain [5]. Hölscher and Strube [12] examined both search and domain expertise.…”

Query‐performance prediction for effective query routing in domain‐specific repositories

“…In addition to the practical implications of this work, the findings on the characteristics of domain-specific repositories, improvements in query-performance prediction, and application of query-performance prediction for improving retrieval performance in distributed repositories can have implications for several IR-research areas including the design of domain-specific repositories (Bhavnani et al, 2006;Finn & Kushmerick, 2006;Marcial & Hemminger, 2010;Muresan & Klavans, 2013;Pattuelli, 2011;Tang, Yang, & Song, 2013), distributed repositories and federated search (Avrahami et al, 2006;Davis & Lagoze, 2000; Paltoglou et al, 2011;Simeoni et al, 2008), query expansion (Alemayehu, 2003;Efthimiadis, 2000;Minker et al, 1973;Shiri & Revie, 2006), query analysis and characteristics (Bashir & Rauber, 2011), and proactive documentrecommendation systems (Liu et al, 2012).…”

Strategy-Based Instruction

“…Many users have difficulty in acquiring strategies to perform effective searches on the Web [Bhavnani 2001], and we believe that our instructional framework could be adapted to teach strategic knowledge to improve information-seeking behavior [Bhavnani 2005;Bhavnani et al 2006]. Our hope is that such research will help achieve our ultimate goal of making users more effective and efficient in the use of a wide range of computer applications.…”