Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
A Study of Multitasking Web Search
ITCC '03 Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Computers and Communications
Multitasking Web Search on Alta Vista
ITCC '04 Proceedings of the International Conference on Information Technology: Coding and Computing (ITCC'04) Volume 2 - Volume 2
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
Web Search: Public Searching of the Web (Information Science and Knowledge Management)
An exploratory web log study of multitasking
SIGIR '06 Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Factors affecting assigned information problem ordering during web search: an exploratory study
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Web searching on the Vivisimo search engine
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Defining a session on Web search engines: Research Articles
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Studying the use of popular destinations to enhance web search interaction
SIGIR '07 Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Website usage metrics: A re-assessment of session data
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
An investigation on a community's web search variability
ACSC '08 Proceedings of the thirty-first Australasian conference on Computer science - Volume 74
Beyond the session timeout: automatic hierarchical segmentation of search topics in query logs
Proceedings of the 17th ACM conference on Information and knowledge management
A survey on session detection methods in query logs and a proposal for future evaluation
Information Sciences: an International Journal
Search the web x.0: mining and recommending web-mediated processes
Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Recommender systems
Impact of search results on user queries
Proceedings of the eleventh international workshop on Web information and data management
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A user's single session with a Web search engine or information retrieval (IR) system may consist of seeking information on single or multiple topics, and switch between tasks or multitasking information behavior. Most Web search sessions consist of two queries of approximately two words. However, some Web search sessions consist of three or more queries. We present findings from two studies. First, a study of two-query search sessions on the Alta Vista Web search engine, and second, a study of three or more query search sessions on the Alta Vista Web search engine. We examine the degree of multitasking search and information task switching during these two sets of Alta Vista Web search sessions. A sample of two-query and three or more query sessions were filtered from Alta Vista transaction logs from 2002 and qualitatively analyzed. Sessions ranged in duration from less than a minute to a few hours. Findings include: (1) 81% of two-query sessions included multiple topics, (2) 91.3% of three or more query sessions included multiple topics, (3) there are a broad variety of topics in multitasking search sessions, and (4) three or more query sessions sometimes contained frequent topic changes. Multitasking is found to be a growing element in Web searching. This paper proposes an approach to interactive information retrieval (IR) contextually within a multitasking framework. The implications of our findings for Web design and further research are discussed.