How does search behavior change as search becomes more difficult?
Abstract
Search engines make it easy to check facts online, but finding some specific kinds of information sometimes proves to be difficult. We studied the behavioral signals that suggest that a user is having trouble in a search task. First, we ran a lab study with 23 users to gain a preliminary understanding on how users' behavior changes when they struggle finding the information they're looking for. The observations were then tested with 179 participants who all completed an average of 22.3 tasks from a pool of 100 tasks. The large-scale study provided quantitative support for our qualitative observations from the lab study. When having difficulty in finding information, users start to formulate more diverse queries, they use advanced operators more, and they spend a longer time on the search result page as compared to the successful tasks. The results complement the existing body of research focusing on successful search strategies.
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Web search behavior changes as the task at hand becomes more difficult.
“Studying web search behavior, Silvestri (2010) found that it varies across semantic domains, and Aula et al. (2010) that it changes as the task at hand becomes more difficult.”
From Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries (2019) · cites this paper as Aula et al., 2010
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Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries
Olteanu, A., Castillo, C., Diaz, F., & Kıcıman, E. (2019) · Frontiers in Big Data · doi:10.3389/fdata.2019.00013 · Cited by 763 · see citing works
Task complexity: A review and conceptualization framework
Liu, P., & Li, Z. (2012) · International Journal of Industrial Ergonomics · doi:10.1016/j.ergon.2012.09.001 · Cited by 438 · see citing works
Kelly, D., Arguello, J., Edwards, A., & Wu, W.-C. (2015) · Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on The Theory of Information Retrieval · doi:10.1145/2808194.2809465 · Cited by 155 · see citing works
Athukorala, K., Głowacka, D., Jacucci, G., Oulasvirta, A., & Vreeken, J. (2016) · Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology · doi:10.1002/asi.23617 · Cited by 150 · see citing works
Social Data: Biases, Methodological Pitfalls, and Ethical Boundaries
Olteanu, A., Castillo, C., Diaz, F., & Kiciman, E. (2016) · doi:10.2139/ssrn.2886526 · Cited by 763 · see citing works
- Authors
- Aula, A., Khan, R. M., & Guan, Z.
- Affiliations
- Google (United States) (US)
- ORCID
- Khan, Rehan M.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2010-04-10
- Pages
- 35-44
- OpenAlex
- W2124318441
- Cited by
- 209
- References
- 0
- Citations by year
- 2026: 1 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 7 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 4 · 2021: 13 · 2020: 10 · 2019: 17 · 2018: 12 · 2017: 17 · 2016: 10 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 19 · 2013: 17 · 2012: 25
- FWCI
- 15.05
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
- Locations
- CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (publishedVersion)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Information Retrieval and Search Behavior
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Web Data Mining and Analysis
- Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Information Systems › Recommender Systems and Techniques
- Keywords
- search behavior, search difficulty, information seeking, query formulation, user frustration, search strategies, web search
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