Exploratory information search by domain experts and novices

Ruogu Kang, Wai Tat Fu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

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.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationIUI 2010 - Proceedings of the 14th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces
Pages329-332
Number of pages4
DOIs
StatePublished - 2010
Externally publishedYes
Event14th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2010 - Hong Kong, China
Duration: Feb 7 2010Feb 10 2010

Publication series

NameInternational Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, Proceedings IUI

Other

Other14th ACM International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces, IUI 2010
Country/TerritoryChina
CityHong Kong
Period2/7/102/10/10

Keywords

  • Domain expertise
  • Exploratory search
  • Social search

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Human-Computer Interaction

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