Search engines are designed to help people get things done: find a local business, plan a vacation, or understand an unfamiliar concept. This focus is demonstrated by how search businesses measure their own performance--by how quickly a user find the page they were looking for. It's considered bad if someone clicks the back button to return to the search results.
But this attitude ignores a growing portion of searches: those performed when people have a few moments to kill and want to discover something entertaining or amusing--for example, when a user searches for "funny pictures" or "interesting new documentaries."
New research suggests that many people use search engines this way, and their behavior is fundamentally different from other searchers' behavior. Understanding this difference might provide new ways for search engines to attract more users and drive more traffic.
Researchers from Swansea University in Wales and the University of Erlangen in Germany presented the results of this research last week at the Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR) workshop in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
Max Wilson, a lecturer in the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University, says that around 90 percent of research into Internet search focuses on improving goal-directed searches--in other words, the kind of search you might do at work. He expects to see more people searching the Internet for a quick moment's entertainment, especially as the number of Internet-connected devices increases. To best serve those people, Wilson says, companies and researchers should look for more ways to provide welcome serendipity through search.
by Max L. Wilson (Swansea University) and David Elsweiler (University of Erlangen)
In trying to understand Exploratory Search, the community has focused on users who are working towards an information need, but who are unclear of their goal, technology, or domain of information. Our recent research, however, suggests that this denition misses perhaps the most exploratory search scenario of all-scenarios where the goal is not information-oriented. We present combined evidence from two on-going research projects, which demonstrates that such situations occur regularly within casual-leisure situations. We use our findings to characterise such tasks and suggest that casual-leisure search scenarios deserve more focus as we work towards supporting exploratory search.
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