How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
The effect of user characteristics on search effectiveness in information retrieval
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Factors affecting the selection of search tactics: Tasks, knowledge, process, and systems
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
The search dashboard: how reflection and comparison impact search behavior
Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
#trapped!: social media search system requirements for emergency management professionals
Proceedings of the 36th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
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In this study, we investigated, through a cognitive psychological experiment and its protocol analysis, human cognitive processes o\/f seeking in\/formation on the WWW and the effects of subject's knowledge and experience on the information seeking processes and performance. In our experiment, the subjects were divided into two groups: one comprising expert subjects and the other novice subjects. All of the subjects were given a general search task and a specific search task. In the experimental results, except for one exceptional subject, we could confirm significant differences between the two groups in the solution time, the number of pages searched, and the kinds of pages accessed. We also propose a behavioral schema for tracing a subject's searching processes. The behavioral schema consists of four behavior levels on the WWW: Search, Results-of-search, Page-following-results, and Page-following-pages. Each subject's behavior was described as a transition of nodes, each representing the subject's behavioral state, and six kinds of operators connecting two nodes: Search, Link, Return, Jump, Browse, and Next among the four behavior levels. The results of an analysis using the schema showed some distinctive subjects' behaviors such as a breadth-first search or a depth-first search. We also examined the descriptions the subjects' behaviors by the schema quantitatively by analyzing the transition rate from one node to another node at each behavior level. The results empirically suggested that a searcher's knowledge and experience do affect his/her information seeking behavior on the WWW.