Information behaviours

“People don’t understand their own information behaviors, and they don’t really understand much about search or the web, so they will have to learn. It could take generations.”

Christina Wodtke from Boxes and Arrows interviews Amanda Spink in Oct 2006.

Most web queries short:
2- 3 terms

Sessions:
2-3 queries in length with little query modification

Long tail:
The long tail makes ‘relevant’ retrieval very hard - especially if users use only 2 or 3 words - search is not very interactive. Personalisation is an attempt to get more info from user to help determine relevance.

Complex search behaviours:
Often long and complex - beyond one topic/one search paradigm most search engine assume

• Successive searching (e.g. looking for information on cars)
• Multitasking search (batch searches - time constraint or new topics emerge)

Search is challenging and interactive:

• no silver bullet or ’single’ feature that’s effective
• clustering + relevance feedback +??
• lack of people trained in info and web retrieval, web design and usability
• how to elucidate real intent from a small number of keywords?