Exploratory information search by domain experts and novices

The arising popularity of social tagging system has the potential to transform traditional web search into a new era of social search. Based on the finding that domain expertise could influence search behavior in traditional search engines, we hypothesized and tested the idea that domain expertise would have similar influence on search behavior in a social tagging system. We conducted an experiment comparing search behavior of experts and novices when they searched using a tradition search engine and a social tagging system. Results from our experiment showed that experts relied more on their own domain knowledge to generate search queries, while novices were influenced more by social cues in the social tagging system. Experts were also found to conform to each other more than novices in their choice of bookmarks and tags. Implications on the design of future social information systems are discussed.