Something Just Like This: A Secret History of the Role of Analogues in Information Seeking

Information seekers often want 'something just like this', an information object (song, book, movie) like one they already know about. This approach is the premise of many modern recommender systems, which ask information seekers for examples of things they like in order to return similar things. This type of information seeking, though, is not particularly well supported by search engines, partly because the ways in which objects can be alike are multifaceted and difficult to articulate, partly because the analogue might emerge in the process of information seeking. This approach to information seeking has been touched on repeatedly in information science literature but not examined in detail. In this paper, we present a pair of studies that explore both how people seek information using analogues online and the ways in which information objects might be alike. Our results offer a novel understanding of a previously underexplored but common behaviour, addressing how analogues are identified, how they are used in information seeking, and the ways in which objects can be analogous from an information seeker's perspective. Our work can support the development of recommender systems, conversational search approaches, and digital interfaces that support this common but little-examined type of information seeking.