Using information scent and need for cognition to understand online search behavior

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to investigate the extent to which two theories, Information Scent and Need for Cognition, explain people's search behaviors when interacting with search engine results pages (SERPs). Information Scent, the perception of the value of information sources, was manipulated by varying the number and distribution of relevant results on the first SERP. Need for Cognition (NFC), a personality trait that measures the extent to which a person enjoys cognitively effortful activities, was measured by a standardized scale. A laboratory experiment was conducted with forty-eight participants, who completed six openended search tasks. Results showed that while interacting with SERPs containing more relevant documents, participants examined more documents and clicked deeper in the search result list. When interacting with SERPs that contained the same number of relevant results distributed across different ranks, participants were more likely to abandon their queries when relevant documents appeared later on the SERP. With respect to NFC, participants with higher NFC paginated less frequently and paid less attention to results at lower ranks than those with lower NFC. The interaction between NFC and the number of relevant results on the SERP affected the time spent on searching and a participant's likelihood to reformulate, paginate and stop. Our findings suggest evaluating system effectiveness based on the first page of results, even for tasks that require the user to view multiple documents, and varying interface features based on NFC.

Information Scent, Searching and Stopping

“…Yet the Search Engine Results Page (SERP) provides various cues which searchers use to decide when to stop, or even whether to begin examining the SERP in detail at all. Thus, current stopping models tend to be agnostic of the information scent [5,30], which has been previously shown to affect a searcher's (stopping) behaviours [4,37]. This scent can be used to determine whether a given SERP smells good enough to enter and examine individual snippets within the SERP in more detail, as per the Patch Model in Foraging Theory [32].…”

“…This may be for a variety of reasons, the primary reason being user satisfaction (or lack of) [10]. Satisfaction from simply examining snippets may lead to good abandonment [16,37]. Alternatively, if the presented SERP looks poor, dissatisfaction occurs.…”

“…Cues such as an article's source were shown to have a powerful effect on the perception of said article. If cues can provide a rationale as to what leads to a promising scent trail, it follows that scent also provides a rationale as to when a searcher will stop examining a set of results [30,36,37]. The distribution of relevant search items also matters: a searcher may continue to forage to greater depths if the SERP appears to contain many relevant items [37].…”

“…If cues can provide a rationale as to what leads to a promising scent trail, it follows that scent also provides a rationale as to when a searcher will stop examining a set of results [30,36,37]. The distribution of relevant search items also matters: a searcher may continue to forage to greater depths if the SERP appears to contain many relevant items [37]. A similar trend was also observed by Card et al [4], who found that when navigating through webpages, searchers were more likely to leave when the information scent began to decline.…”

“…[8,21,27,33,37]). Wu et al [37] conducted a user study where the scent of the first SERP was manipulated. They created low, medium and high scent SERPs by changing the number and distribution of relevant items on the page.…”