Related papers: Ordinary Search Engine Users assessing Difficulty,…
Web search engines have become the dominant tools for finding information on the Internet. Due to their popularity, users apply them to a wide range of search needs, from simple look-ups to rather complex information tasks. This paper…
It is widely known that people become better at an activity if they perform this activity long and often. Yet, the question is whether being active in related areas like communicating online, writing blog articles or commenting on community…
Assessing cognitive load on web search is useful for characterizing search system features and search tasks with respect to their demands on the searcher's mental effort. It is also helpful for examining how individual differences among…
The World Wide Web is a vast and continuously changing source of information where searching is a frequent, and sometimes critical, user task. Searching is not always the user's primary goal but an ancillary task that is performed to find…
There is a growing demand for transparency in search engines to understand how search results are curated and to enhance users' trust. Prior research has introduced search result explanations with a focus on how to explain, assuming…
Search engines like Google, Yahoo or Bing are an excellent support for finding documents, but this strength also imposes a limitation. As they are optimized for document retrieval tasks, they perform less well when it comes to more complex…
When users are looking for information on the Web, they show different behavior for different task types, e.g., for fact finding vs. information gathering tasks. For example, related work in this area has investigated how this behavior can…
The objective of this research was to find out how the two search engines Google and Bing perform when users work freely on pre-defined tasks, and judge the relevance of the results immediately after finishing their search session. In a…
Web search is among the most ubiquitous online activities, commonly used to acquire new knowledge and to satisfy learning-related objectives through informational search sessions. The importance of learning as an outcome of web search has…
The search task and the system both affect the demand on cognitive resources during information search. In some situations, the demands may become too high for a person. This article has a three-fold goal. First, it presents and critiques…
Conversational search presents opportunities to support users in their search activities to improve the effectiveness and efficiency of search while reducing their cognitive load. Limitations of the potential competency of conversational…
Search conducted in a work context is an everyday activity that has been around since long before the Web was invented, yet we still seem to understand little about its general characteristics. With this paper we aim to contribute to a…
The crucial role of the evaluation in the development of the information retrieval tools is useful evidence to improve the performance of these tools and the quality of results that they return. However, the classic evaluation approaches…
Improved software discovery is a prerequisite for greater software reuse: after all, if someone cannot find software for a particular task, they cannot reuse it. Understanding people's approaches and preferences when they look for software…
The goal of this study is to expand our understanding of the relationships between selected tasks, cognitive abilities and search result interfaces. The underlying objective is to understand how to select search results presentation for…
Search is an integral part of a software development process. Developers often use search engines to look for information during development, including reusable code snippets, API understanding, and reference examples. Developers tend to…
User-centered approaches have been extensively studied and used in the area of struggling search. Related research has targeted key aspects of users such as user satisfaction or frustration, and search success or failure, using a variety of…
Search engines could consistently favor certain values over the others, which is considered as biased due to the built-in infrastructures. Many studies have been dedicated to detect, control, and mitigate the impacts of the biases from the…
Different search engines provide different outputs for the same keyword. This may be due to different definitions of relevance, and/or to different knowledge/anticipation of users' preferences, but rankings are also suspected to be biased…
Web search engines apply a variety of ranking signals to achieve user satisfaction, i.e., results pages that provide the best-possible results to the user. While these ranking signals implicitly consider credibility (e.g., by measuring…