research-article

Searching, browsing, and clicking in a search session: changes in user behavior by task and over time

Authors:

James AllanAuthors Info & Claims

SIGIR '14: Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval

Pages 607 - 616

https://doi.org/10.1145/2600428.2609633

Published: 03 July 2014 Publication History

Abstract

There are many existing studies of user behavior in simple tasks (e.g., navigational and informational search) within a short duration of 1--2 queries. However, we know relatively little about user behavior, especially browsing and clicking behavior, for longer search session solving complex search tasks. In this paper, we characterize and compare user behavior in relatively long search sessions (10 minutes; about 5 queries) for search tasks of four different types. The tasks differ in two dimensions: (1) the user is locating facts or is pursuing intellectual understanding of a topic; (2) the user has a specific task goal or has an ill-defined and undeveloped goal. We analyze how search behavior as well as browsing and clicking patterns change during a search session in these different tasks. Our results indicate that user behavior in the four types of tasks differ in various aspects, including search activeness, browsing style, clicking strategy, and query reformulation. As a search session progresses, we note that users shift their interests to focus less on the top results but more on results ranked at lower positions in browsing. We also found that results eventually become less and less attractive for the users. The reasons vary and include downgraded search performance of query, decreased novelty of search results, and decaying persistence of users in browsing. Our study highlights the lack of long session support in existing search engines and suggests different strategies of supporting longer sessions according to different task types.

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Cited By

Zhu RCheng CSong YCai Z(2024)Modeling Attentive Interaction Behavior for Web Content Identification in Exploratory Information SeekingProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36997508:4(1-28)Online publication date: 21-Nov-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699750
Azzopardi LClarke CKantor PMitra BTrippas JRen ZAliannejadi MArabzadeh NChandrasekar Rde Rijke MEustratiadis PHersh WHuang JKanoulas EKareem JLi YLupart SMekonnen KRoegiest ASoboroff ISilvestri FVerberne SVos DYang EZhao Y(2024)Report on the Search Futures Workshop at ECIR 2024ACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3687273.368728858:1(1-41)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687273.3687288
Shao YLi HWu YLiu YAi QMao JMa YMa S(2023)An Intent Taxonomy of Legal Case RetrievalACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/362609342:2(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626093
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Index Terms

Searching, browsing, and clicking in a search session: changes in user behavior by task and over time
1. Information systems
  1. Information retrieval
    1. Information retrieval query processing

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cover image ACM Conferences

SIGIR '14: Proceedings of the 37th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research & development in information retrieval

July 2014

1330 pages

ISBN:9781450322577

DOI:10.1145/2600428

General Chairs:
Shlomo Geva
Queensland University of Technology
,
Andrew Trotman
University of Dunedin
,
Program Chairs:
Peter Bruza
Queensland University of Technology
,
Charles L.A. Clarke
University of Waterloo
,
Kal Järvelin
University of Tampere

Copyright © 2014 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 the author(s) 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].

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SIGIR: ACM Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval

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New York, NY, United States

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Published: 03 July 2014

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SIGIR '14: The 37th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

July 6 - 11, 2014

Queensland, Gold Coast, Australia

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SIGIR '14 Paper Acceptance Rate 82 of 387 submissions, 21%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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Cited By

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3699750
Azzopardi LClarke CKantor PMitra BTrippas JRen ZAliannejadi MArabzadeh NChandrasekar Rde Rijke MEustratiadis PHersh WHuang JKanoulas EKareem JLi YLupart SMekonnen KRoegiest ASoboroff ISilvestri FVerberne SVos DYang EZhao Y(2024)Report on the Search Futures Workshop at ECIR 2024ACM SIGIR Forum10.1145/3687273.368728858:1(1-41)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2024
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3687273.3687288
Shao YLi HWu YLiu YAi QMao JMa YMa S(2023)An Intent Taxonomy of Legal Case RetrievalACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/362609342:2(1-27)Online publication date: 29-Sep-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3626093
McGregor MAzzopardi LHalvey M(2023)A Systematic Review of Cost, Effort, and Load Research in Information Search and Retrieval, 1972–2020ACM Transactions on Information Systems10.1145/358306942:1(1-39)Online publication date: 18-Aug-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3583069
Shah CWhite RThomas PMitra BSarkar SBelkin N(2023)Taking Search to TaskProceedings of the 2023 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval10.1145/3576840.3578288(1-13)Online publication date: 19-Mar-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3576840.3578288
Mysore SJasim MMccallum AZamani HChen HDuh WHuang HKato MMothe JPoblete B(2023)Editable User Profiles for Controllable Text RecommendationsProceedings of the 46th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3539618.3591677(993-1003)Online publication date: 19-Jul-2023
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Dosso CTamine LPaubel PChevalier A(2023)Navigational and thematic exploration–exploitation trade-offs during web search: effects of prior domain knowledge, search contexts and strategies on search outcomeBehaviour & Information Technology10.1080/0144929X.2023.224251443:10(2232-2258)Online publication date: 10-Aug-2023
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