Exploring query patterns in email search

  • Authors:
  • Morgan Harvey;David Elsweiler

  • Affiliations:
  • Dept. Computer Science 8 (AI), Univeristy of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany;Institute for Information and Media, Language and Culture, University of Regensburg, Germany

  • Venue:
  • ECIR'12 Proceedings of the 34th European conference on Advances in Information Retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Despite Email being the most popular communication medium currently in use and that people have been shown to regularly re-use messages, very little is known about how people actually search within email clients. In this paper we present a detailed analysis of email search behaviour obtained from a study of 47 users. We uncover a number of behavioral patterns that contrast with those previously observed in web search. From our findings, we describe ways in which email search could be improved and conclude with a short discussion of possible future work.