Article

The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search

Authors:

Christine Alvarado,

Mark S. Ackerman,

David R. KargerAuthors Info & Claims

CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

Pages 415 - 422

https://doi.org/10.1145/985692.985745

Published: 25 April 2004 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a modified diary study that investigated how people performed personally motivated searches in their email, in their files, and on the Web. Although earlier studies of directed search focused on keyword search, most of the search behavior we observed did not involve keyword search. Instead of jumping directly to their information target using keywords, our participants navigated to their target with small, local steps using their contextual knowledge as a guide, even when they knew exactly what they were looking for in advance. This stepping behavior was especially common for participants with unstructured information organization. The observed advantages of searching by taking small steps include that it allowed users to specify less of their information need and provided a context in which to understand their results. We discuss the implications of such advantages for the design of personal information management tools.

References

[1]

Ackerman, M. S., and Halverson, C. (1998). Considering an organization's memory. In Proc. of CSCW '98, 39--48.

Digital Library

[2]

Bates, M. (1979). Information search tactics. JASIS, 30: 205--214.

[3]

Bates, M. (1989). The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface. Online Review, 13: 407--424.

[4]

Belkin, N. J. (1993). Interaction with texts: Information retrieval as information-seeking behavior. In Proc. of Information Retrieval, 55--66.

[5]

Bernard, H. R. (1994). Research methods in anthropology: Qualitative and quantitative approaches. Landham, MD: Altamira Press.

Digital Library

[6]

Broder, A. (2002). A Taxonomy of Web search. SIGIR Forum, 36(2): 3--10.

Digital Library

[7]

Capra, R. G. and Perez-Quinones, M. A. (2003). Re-finding found things: An exploratory study of how users re-find information, Technical Report, Virginia Tech.

[8]

Ducheneaut, N. and Bellotti, V. (2001). E-mail as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management. interactions, 8(5): 30--38.

Digital Library

[9]

Dumais, S., Cutrell, E. and Chen, H. (2001). Optimizing search by showing results in context. In Proc. of CHI '01, 277--284.

Digital Library

[10]

Jones, W., Dumais, S. and Bruce, H. (2002). Once found, what then?: A study of "keeping" behaviors in the personal use of Web information. In Proc. of ASIST '02, 391--402.

[11]

Jul, S. and Furnas, G. W. (1997). Navigation in electronic worlds: Workshop report. SIGCHI Bulletin, 29(2):44--49.

Digital Library

[12]

Kim, K. S. and Allen, B. (2002). Cognitive and task influences on Web searching. JASIST, 52(2): 109--119.

Digital Library

[13]

Lansdale, M. (1988). The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics, 19(1): 458--465.

[14]

Lawrence, S. (2000). Context in Web search. IEEE Data Engineering Bulletin, 23(3): 25--32.

[15]

Lin, J., Quan, D., Sinha, V., Bakshi, K., Huynh, D., Katz, B. and Karger, D. R. (2003). The role of context in question answering systems. In Proc. of CHI '03 (Extended Abstracts), 1006--1007.

Digital Library

[16]

Maglio, P. P. and Barrett, R. (1997). How to build modeling agents to support Web searchers. In Proc. of UM '97, 5--16.

[17]

Malone, T. E. (1983). How do people organize their desks? ACM Trans. on Office Information Systems, 1(1): 99--112.

Digital Library

[18]

Marchionini, Gary. (1995). Information seeking in electronic environments. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Digital Library

[19]

Muramatsu, J. and Pratt, W. (2001). Transparent queries: Investigating users' mental models of search engines. In Proc. of SIGIR '01, 217--224.

Digital Library

[20]

Nardi, B. and Barreau, D. (1995). Finding and reminding: file organization from the desktop. ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 27(3): 39--43.

Digital Library

[21]

O'Day, V. and Jeffries, R. (1993). Orienteering in an information landscape: How information seekers get from here to there. In Proc. of CHI '93, 438--445.

Digital Library

[22]

Palen, L. and Salzman M. (2002). Voice-mail diary studies for naturalistic data capture under mobile conditions. In Proc. of CSCW '02, 87--95.

Digital Library

[23]

Quan, D. and Karger, D. R. (2004). Haystack: A personalized, unified interface to creating, browsing, and organizing arbitrary information. In Proc. of CHI '04 (Extended Abstracts).

Digital Library

[24]

Sellen, A. J., Murphy, R. and Shaw, K. (2002). How knowledge workers use the Web. In Proc. of CHI '02, 227--234.

Digital Library

[25]

Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, B. J. and Saracevic, T. (2001). Searching the Web: The public and their queries. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 52(3): 226--234.

Digital Library

[26]

Suchman, L. A. (1987). Plans and situated actions. New York: Cambridge University Press.

Digital Library

[27]

Whittaker, S. and Sidner, C. (1996). Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email. In Proc. of CHI '96, 276--283.

Digital Library

[28]

Yee, K-P., Swearingen, K., Li, K. and Hearst, M. (2003). Faceted metadata for image search and browsing. In Proc. of CHI '03, 401--408.

Digital Library

Cited By

Park JLee CCho EOh U(2024)Enhancing the Podcast Browsing Experience through Topic Segmentation and Visualization with Generative AIProceedings of the 2024 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences10.1145/3639701.3656324(117-128)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639701.3656324
Milton AMaestre JRoy AUmbach RChancellor S(2024)Seeking in Cycles: How Users Leverage Personal Information Ecosystems to Find Mental Health InformationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641894(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641894
Ghosh SGhosh SShah CKlein MBen-David AJäschke RKelly M(2024)Toward Connecting Speech Acts and Search Actions in Conversational Search TasksProceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00027(119-131)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00027
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)

Recommendations

Focused ranking in a vertical search engine
SIGIR '07: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

Since the debut of PageRank and HITS, hyperlink-induced Web document ranking has come a long way. The Web has become increasingly vast and topically diverse. Such vastness has led many into the area of topic-sensitive ranking and its variants. We ...
Google Search Engine: Seo Tools You Need to Explode Your Website Traffic - Google Seo, Google Ranking
A session-based search engine
SIGIR '04: Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval

In this poster, we describe a novel session-based search engine, which puts the search in context. The search engine has a number of session-based features including expansion of the current query with user query history and clickthrough data (title and ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences

CHI '04: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 2004

742 pages

ISBN:1581137028

DOI:10.1145/985692

Conference Chairs:
Elizabeth Dykstra-Erickson
Kinoma
,
Manfred Tscheligi
CURE, Austria

Copyright © 2004 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

Sponsors

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 25 April 2004

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Article

Conference

CHI04

Sponsor:

CHI04: CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

April 24 - 29, 2004

Vienna, Austria

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

343
Total Citations
View Citations
5,718
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)283
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)12

Reflects downloads up to 15 Sep 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Park JLee CCho EOh U(2024)Enhancing the Podcast Browsing Experience through Topic Segmentation and Visualization with Generative AIProceedings of the 2024 ACM International Conference on Interactive Media Experiences10.1145/3639701.3656324(117-128)Online publication date: 7-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3639701.3656324
Milton AMaestre JRoy AUmbach RChancellor S(2024)Seeking in Cycles: How Users Leverage Personal Information Ecosystems to Find Mental Health InformationProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3641894(1-16)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641894
Ghosh SGhosh SShah CKlein MBen-David AJäschke RKelly M(2024)Toward Connecting Speech Acts and Search Actions in Conversational Search TasksProceedings of the 2023 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00027(119-131)Online publication date: 26-Jun-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/JCDL57899.2023.00027
Oh K(2024)A comprehensive investigation of researchers’ shared file management practices in cloud storageHuman–Computer Interaction10.1080/07370024.2024.2310551(1-20)Online publication date: 9-Feb-2024
https://doi.org/10.1080/07370024.2024.2310551
Skjæveland MBalog KBernard NŁajewska WLinjordet T(2024)An ecosystem for personal knowledge graphs: A survey and research roadmapAI Open10.1016/j.aiopen.2024.01.0035(55-69)Online publication date: 2024
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.aiopen.2024.01.003
Primbault S(2023)Naviguer dans les savoirs à l’ère numérique. Pour une ethnographie des pratiques informationnelles sur GallicaÉtudes de communication10.4000/edc.16108(61-89)Online publication date: 11-Dec-2023
https://doi.org/10.4000/edc.16108
Adavi KAcker A(2023)What is a File on a Phone? Personal Information Management Practices Amongst WhatsApp UsersProceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction10.1145/36102217:CSCW2(1-28)Online publication date: 4-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3610221
Lindley SWilkins D(2023)Building Knowledge through Action: Considerations for Machine Learning in the WorkplaceACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/358494730:5(1-51)Online publication date: 23-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3584947
Nassif MRobillard M(2023)A Field Study of Developer Documentation FormatExtended Abstracts of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544549.3585767(1-7)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544549.3585767
Bergman OSher E(2023)File Search: A Contrast Between Beliefs and BehaviorInteracting with Computers10.1093/iwc/iwad00534:6(150-154)Online publication date: 18-Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1093/iwc/iwad005
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Publication

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Table of Contents