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

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: Mark S. Ackerman , Christine Halverson, Considering an organization's memory, Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, p.39-48, November 14-18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/289444.289461]
• 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: Research & Education Association, C++, Research & Education Association, 2000
• 6: Andrei Broder, A taxonomy of web search, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.36 n.2, Fall 2002 [doi>10.1145/792550.792552]
• 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: Nicolas Ducheneaut , Victoria Bellotti, E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management, interactions, v.8 n.5, p.30-38, Sept./Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/382899.383305]
• 9: Susan Dumais , Edward Cutrell , Hao Chen, Optimizing search by showing results in context, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.277-284, March 2001, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/365024.365116]
• 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: Susanne Jul , George W. Furnas, Navigation in electronic worlds: a CHI 97 workshop, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.29 n.4, p.44-49, Oct. 1997 [doi>10.1145/270950.270979]
• 12: Kyung-Sun Kim , Bryce Allen, Cognitive and task influences on Web searching behavior, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.53 n.2, p.109-119, January 15, 2002 [doi>10.1002/asi.10014]
• 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: Jimmy Lin , Dennis Quan , Vineet Sinha , Karun Bakshi , David Huynh , Boris Katz , David R. Karger, The role of context in question answering systems, CHI '03 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/765891.766119]
• 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: Thomas W. Malone, How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.1 n.1, p.99-112, Jan. 1983 [doi>10.1145/357423.357430]
• 18: Gary Marchionini, Information seeking in electronic environments, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1995
• 19: Jack Muramatsu , Wanda Pratt, Transparent Queries: investigation users' mental models of search engines, Proceedings of the 24th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.217-224, September 2001, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/383952.383991]
• 20: Deborah Barreau , Bonnie A. Nardi, Finding and reminding: file organization from the desktop, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.27 n.3, p.39-43, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/221296.221307]
• 21: Vicki L. O'Day , Robin Jeffries, Orienteering in an information landscape: how information seekers get from here to there, Proceedings of the INTERCHI '93 conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.438-445, May 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands
• 22: Leysia Palen , Marilyn Salzman, Voice-mail diary studies for naturalistic data capture under mobile conditions, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587092]
• 23: David R. Karger , Dennis Quan, Haystack: a user interface for creating, browsing, and organizing arbitrary semistructured information, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.985931]
• 24: Abigail J. Sellen , Rachel Murphy , Kate L. Shaw, How knowledge workers use the web, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: Changing our world, changing ourselves, April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA [doi>10.1145/503376.503418]
• 25: Amanda Spink , Dietmar Wolfram , Major B. J. Jansen , Tefko Saracevic, Searching the Web: the public and their queries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.52 n.3, p.226-234, Feb. 1, 2001 [doi>10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1591>3.3.CO;2-I]
• 26: Lucy A. Suchman, Plans and situated actions: the problem of human-machine communication, Cambridge University Press, New York, NY, 1987
• 27: Steve Whittaker , Candace Sidner, Email overload: exploring personal information management of email, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.276-283, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238530]
• 28: Ka-Ping Yee , Kirsten Swearingen , Kevin Li , Marti Hearst, Faceted metadata for image search and browsing, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, April 05-10, 2003, Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, USA [doi>10.1145/642611.642681]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.1 MODELS AND PRINCIPLES
      H.1.2 User/Machine Systems
          Subjects: Human factors

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Human Factors

Keywords:
context, information seeking, observational study, orienteering, search, teleporting