Current trends in the integration of searching and browsing

ABSTRACT

Searching and browsing are the two basic information discovery paradigms, since the early days of the Web. After more than ten years down the road, three schools seem to have emerged: (1) The search-centric school argues that guided navigation is superfluous since free form search has become so good and the search UI so common, that users can satisfy all their needs via simple queries (2) The taxonomy navigation school claims that users have difficulties expressing informational needs and (3) The meta-data centric school advocates the use of meta-data for narrowing large sets of results, and is successful in e-commerce where it is known as "multi faceted search". This panel brings together experts and advocates for all three schools, who will discuss these approaches and share their experiences in the field. We will ask the audience to challenge our experts with real information architecture problems.