ASIST: Studies of Searching Behaviors Studies of Searching Behaviors
Wednesday, November 2, 2005 8:30am

Dick Stenmark, Searching the Intranet
Intranets differ from public web (Fagin et al 2003).  They’re growing (size, number, importance)

Method:  a la Spink et al 2001, sessions spanned multiple days (definition of session not trivial)
Session definition (type a: related activities in different sessions , type b: unrelated activities together) – idle time set as 13 minutes.  They played with different thresholds first.

61% of users – one activity per session (backs up the open internet idea that users aren’t refining their searches or viewing multiple pages of results) Maximum session length 1 hour.
69.2% one word querys-- avg 1.4 words/query
90% users didn’t go beyond the first page (10 results)

Conclusions:  

• may be shorter than on the public web
• queries are significantly shorter than on the web
• users view fewer result pages

Future

• other intranets
• is it finding faster or giving up
• what’s going on with the few users who have lots of activities and long sessions

Questions from the audience:  

• depends on the structure and content of the intranet (large manufacturing company)
• another person from Pitt see combined method with search query refinement pattern and time out
• also need to do qualitative for what the searchers are looking for
• how big is the intranet?  <<1M docs
• from Lawley (audience member) is there a content management system?  Also, might the search queries be smaller because the user has already navigated down to a sub domain with a narrower scope?  (also are intranet searchers more likely to do fact searches instead of subject exploration so therefore have shorter searches?  A more interesting question)

Sherry Koshman, Repeat visits to Vivisimo
Information problem > time > search episodes
How often do people return?  What are the characteristics of repeated sessions
68% of users made repeat visits, weekday searching higher number of sessions
Jihyun Kim, Finding Documents in a Digital Institutional Repository
Looked at archives in DSpace and Eprints, compared 2 commonly used open access institutional repository software packages

Looked at Australian National University, which has both interfaces for the same sets of documents
From Heuristics
Dspace is better – more simplified search forms which were preferred.
Eprints is better – minimizig the user’s memory load

Recommendations
Three box search forms were preferred in each
Provide examples of search queries
List search results in a useful way
Useful components displayed per result
Clearly present a link to open the full text
  ¶ 10:03 PM| |cites (technorati) |