Tools-at-hand and learning in multi-session, collaborative search

Abstract

Improving search interfaces and algorithms are major foci of HCI and information retrieval (IR) research respectively. However, less attention has been given to understanding how users collect, manage, organize, and share the results they find from conducting searches on the Web and designing tools to support their needs. In this paper, we present results from a study in which we interviewed 30 people in three cohorts (academic researchers, corporate workers, and people looking for medical information) about their current practices conducting, managing, and sharing information from ongoing, exploratory searches. We report results on users' current practices, tool use, areas of difficulties and associated coping strategies with emphasis on how information seekers use a variety of "tools-at-hand" beyond search engines and web browsers as they search, process, and share results, and on the learning processes that occur as they seek and use information over time.

SearchPanel

“…To manage the information load that complex search tasks generate, searchers tend to make heavy use of bookmarking, re-searching to locate previously seen content, and printing, emailing and saving pages [4], [16]. A number of features exist within experimental search systems to support complex search tasks, although studies have shown that these features are rarely found in the wild [11].…”

A prediction model for web search hit counts using word frequencies

“…For this purpose we chose the 5000 most frequent English words from the Brown Corpus [37]. 2 Stop words [38], bigrams and contractions, such as I'd were removed, leaving 4632 words. We sampled the most frequent English words, because we do not have access to the frequency distribution of the whole BNC.…”

The ResultsSpace collaborative search environment

“…Workshops Much of the research to date has focused on synchronous collaborative search, in which people sit at different computers, but conduct searches at the same time. However, several recent surveys have shown that people do a significant amount of asynchronous collaborative searching [2] [4] and that existing tools do not support this activity well [1]. Many users rely on simple "tools-at-hand" such as email and text documents to organize their collaborative searches [1].…”

“…However, several recent surveys have shown that people do a significant amount of asynchronous collaborative searching [2] [4] and that existing tools do not support this activity well [1]. Many users rely on simple "tools-at-hand" such as email and text documents to organize their collaborative searches [1]. In this project, we set out to study asynchronous collaborative search activities.…”