Relevance for browsing, relevance for searching

  • Authors:

  • David Bodoff

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Information and Systems Management, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Clear Water Bay, Kowloon, Hong Kong

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2006

Quantified Score

Hi-index 0.00

Visualization

Abstract

The concept of relevance has received a great deal of theoretical attention. Separately, the relationship between focused search and browsing has also received extensive theoretical attention. This article aims to integrate these two literatures with a model and an empirical study that relate relevance in focused searching to relevance in browsing. Some factors affect both kinds of relevance in the same direction; others affect them in different ways. In our empirical study, we find that the latter factors dominate, so that there is actually a negative correlation between the probability of a document's relevance to a browsing user and its probability of relevance to a focused searcher. © 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.