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Information Seeking on the Web

[Original Journal Article]

Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull

Keywords

world wide web, information seeking, information retrieval, browsing, web browser, searching, finding, behavioral model, user behavior, log analysis, quantitative, qualitative

Cite As

Chun Wei Choo, Brian Detlor and Don Turnbull (2000) Information Seeking on the Web: An Integrated Model of Browsing and Searching. First Monday, volume 5, number 2 (February 2000).

Abstract

This paper presents findings from a study of how knowledge workers use the Web to seek external information as part of their daily work. Thirty-four users from seven companies took part in the study. Participants were mainly IT specialists, managers, and research/marketing/consulting staff working in organizations that included a large utility company, a major bank, and a consulting firm. Participants answered a detailed questionnaire and were interviewed individually in order to understand their information needs and information seeking preferences. A custom-developed WebTracker software application was installed on each of their work place PCs, and participants’ Web-use activities were then recorded continuously during two-week periods. The WebTracker recorded how participants used the browser to seek information on the Web: it logged menu choices, button bar selections, and keystroke actions, allowing browsing and searching sequences to be reconstructed. In a second round of personal interviews, participants recalled critical incidents of using information from the Web.

Data from the two interviews and the WebTracker logs constituted the database for analysis. Sixty-one significant episodes of information seeking were identified. A model was developed to describe the common repertoires of information seeking that were observed. On one axis of the model, episodes were plotted according to the four scanning modes identified by Aguilar (1967), Weick and Daft (1983): undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. Each mode is characterized by its own information needs and information seeking strategies. On the other axis of the model, episodes were plotted according to the occurrence of one or more of the six categories of information seeking behaviors identified by Ellis (1989, 1990): starting, chaining, browsing, differentiating, monitoring, and extracting. The study suggests that a behavioral framework that relates motivations (Aguilar) and moves (Ellis) may be helpful in analyzing patterns of Web-based information seeking.

Excerpt

Towards a Behavioral Model of Information Seeking on the Web

Aguilar’s modes of scanning and Ellis’ seeking behaviors may be combined and extended in a new behavioral model of information seeking on the Web. The figure below identifies four main modes of information seeking on the Web: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing, informal search, and formal search. For each mode, the figure indicates which information seeking activities or moves are likely to occur frequently, as suggested by theory.

Figure 3: Behavioral Modes and Moves of Information Seeking on the Web

Starting Chaining Browsing Differentiating Monitoring Extracting
Undirected Viewing Identifying, selecting, starting pages and sites Following links on initial pages
Conditioned Viewing Browsing entry pages, headings, site maps Bookmarking, printing, copying;
Going directly to known site		 Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information
Informal Search Bookmarking, printing, copying;
Going directly to known site		 Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information Using (local) search engines to extract information
Formal Search Revisiting ‘favorite’ or bookmarked sites for new information Using search engines to extract information

Undirected Viewing

In the undirected viewing mode on the Web, we expect to see many instances of starting and chaining. Starting occurs when viewers begin their Web use on pre-selected default home pages, or when they visit a favorite page or site to begin their viewing (such as news, newspaper, or magazine sites). Chaining occurs when viewers notice items of interest (often by chance), and then follow hypertext links to more information on those items. Forward chaining of the sort just described is the most typical during undirected viewing. Backward chaining is also possible, since search engines can be used to locate other Web pages that point to the site that the user is currently at.

Conditioned Viewing

In the conditioned viewing mode on the Web, we expect browsing, differentiating, and monitoring to be common. Differentiating occurs as viewers select Web sites or pages that they expect to provide relevant information. Sites may be differentiated based on prior personal visits, or recommendations by others (such as word-of-mouth or published reviews). Differentiated sites are often bookmarked. When visiting differentiated sites, viewers browse the content by looking through tables of contents, site maps, or list of items and categories. Viewers may also monitor highly differentiated sites by returning regularly to browse, or by keeping abreast of new content (through, for example subscribing to newsletters that report new material on the site).

Informal Search

During informal search on the Web, we expect differentiating, extracting, and monitoring to be typical. Again, informal search is likely to be attempted at a small number of Web sites that have been differentiated by the individual, based on the individual’s knowledge about these sites’ information relevance, quality, affiliation, dependability, and so on. Extracting is relatively “informal” in the sense that searching would be localized to looking for information within the selected site(s). Extracting is also likely to make use of the basic, ‘simple’ search features or commands of the local search engine, in order to get at the most important or most recent information, without attempting to be comprehensive. Monitoring becomes more proactive if the individual sets up push channels or software agents that automatically find and deliver information based on keywords or subject headings.

Formal Search

During formal search on the Web, we expect primarily extracting operations, with some complementary monitoring activity. Formal search makes use of search engines that cover the Web relatively comprehensively, and that provide a powerful set of search features that can focus retrieval. Because the individual wishes not to miss any important information, there is a willingness to spend more time in the search, to learn and use complex search features, and to evaluate the sources that are found in terms of quality or accuracy. Formal search may be two-staged: multi-site searching that identifies significant sources is then followed by within-site searching. Within-site searching may involve fairly intensive foraging. Extracting may be supported by monitoring activity, again through services such as Web site alerts, push channels/agents, and e-mail announcements, in order to keep up with late-breaking information.

References in this publication

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PIKII – A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator

[PDF]

K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein and Don Turnbull

Keywords

information management, personal information management, pim, hypertext, wiki, personalization, information organization, blogging, computer-supported cooperative work

Cite As

K. Andrew Edmonds, James Blustein and Don Turnbull (2006). A Personal Information and Knowledge Infrastructure Integrator. Journal of Digital Information, 5(1).

Abstract

The Next Big Thing is being grown organically, cultivated by software developers and pruned by personal Weblog publishers. The rising Weblogging space of the Internet is looking more like traditional hypertext than the Web of the 1990s. The ways in which Weblogging has evolved beyond the previous limitations of the Web as hypertext, and the ways Weblogging is evolving towards common-use hypertext destined to play a critical role in everyday life, will be explored. We have a vision of a universal information management system built on extending the traditional hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information, as well as to participate in shared discussion. We begin by expressing a vision of common-use hypertext for information management and interpersonal communication.

This vision is grounded in the rapid evolution of Weblogs and known issues in information systems and hypertext. The practical implications of who will use these systems, and how, is expanded as usage scenarios for Weblogs now and in the future. After recapping the current issues facing the Weblogging community, we look to the long-range implementation issues with optimism. Our system is forward-looking yet realistic. The activities the system will support are extrapolated from recent developments in the online community, and most of the sketches of implementation are based on current approaches. It is of more than passing interest that the features we extrapolate were all described by Nelson as early hypertext ideals. Of particular interest is that the features are now being implemented because of perceived immediate need by communities of interest.

Excerpt

Looking Ahead
An enriched personal history of interaction with any networked information, organized by time, location or activity will add much-needed context to ubiquitous computing and its potential for always-on history collection. This history will be available in the universal information manager for user controlled contributions to a spectrum of distributed access, from private to public and dynamic to archival. Already the practice of moblogging (i.e. the use of digital camera-equipped cell phones to take and share photographs taken anywhere [8]) is expanding the abilities of personal information collections. Moreover, this expansion of digital information collection leads to a multimedia-rich world of individual history, shareable with family, friends and others as permitted. Flexible recombinations of media will allow the easy assemblage of interlinked hypermedia scrapbooks in the PIKII: to catalog the interactions of subsets of people, places and activities enabled by automatically created metadata at the time of media creation, through subsequent interaction and by explicit tagging.

Systems that generate and use implicit tagging and information classification are also key elements of the PIKII. Just as Google uses popularity and relevance measures to sort and rank Web information, authoring tools will enable the use of information annotation in appropriate metadata dimensions to add information about a link or node of information. Such link type information might be, at its simplest, an affective score or a value along a more sophisticated dimension such as typing the rhetorical relationship. This information, when combined with personal history, information content, the interaction with a peer’s data (expressed in any number of ways from a blog post, shared access to personal information or popularity measures), will be key factors that help make information searching more personally relevant.
Beyond singular units of information, the PIKII will provide interfaces for mapping discussions distributed across the Internet and could be the catalyst for widescale adoption of link types in more traditional discussion systems. Affective components of link types may dominate the social aspects of Weblog communication due to simplicity in authoring and dynamic typing through the explicit and implicit methods previously noted. While transclusion and annotation have formed the basis for widespread adoption of hypertext for Weblog communication, the proposed link and node type additions, as well as more general metadata improvements, will facilitate the intertwingling of information, but with an intelligence to help manage attention and provenance

In many ways, this article aligns with a subset of the goals of the semantic Web space (Berners-Lee et al. 2001), which also promises utility for metadata-enriched information about everyday events. In an ideal world, service providers and vendors, software tools and agencies would offer information in standardized, metadata-enriched, machine readable formats suitable for semantic Web intentions. Many chores might be automated, as in the arrangement of health care for example.
Expanding from the semantic Web, a system of successful micropayment schemes may arise, whether they be karmic and barter schemes or involve actual funds transfer that may drive the received value of both preparing and accessing this semantically-enriched information. Information exchanges with knowledgeable experts and the distribution of favors through a Friend-of-a-Friend network may prove to be more valuable and more popular than micropayments. As we have seen, a key to the widespread adoption of Web information to date is the ability to connect openly with individuals and groups who share common interests, a trend that should continue.

This combination of personal, aggregate and networked contextualizing of information nodes and their linking methods has wide-ranging potential for many dimensions of personal knowledge management efforts. The critical need for personal information management and publishing is to bring the fluency that Weblogging software has created for publishing to the process of connecting and integrating information, leading to a storehouse of personal knowledge.

Conclusion
We have a vision of a universal information management system built on a hypertext framework. In our utopian future, everyone will use tools descended from today’s blogs to structure, search and share personal information as well as to participate in shared discussion. Just as Nelson (1990) envisioned a network where everything is deeply intertwingled, we propose that not only everything, but everyone can belong to several, possibly overlapping and discordant, intertwingled communities of interest. These communities will form dense networks of information linkage, allowing many types of structured and unstructured content to continually expand and weave even more interconnected webs of relationships.
People are motivated to communicate many aspects of their lives to many different audiences. The rapid growth of Weblogging has affirmed the appeal of hypertext and validated the notion of individuals as content producers. The availability of personal hypertext systems, with support for granular control over sharing nodes, will increase this adoption for both Weblog authors and readers.
The growth in the amount of digitally captured and hypertextualized information in the coming years will be even more astounding than the growth of the Web over the past ten years. There are significant technical challenges to overcome, but the standards-based organic growth of Weblogs and the Internet shows methods by which these challenges might be overcome. Rejecting the Web as not-hypertext is missing the point. The Web is an incubator for a continuously evolving system of content, user interests and supporting technologies.

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Information Architecture

[PDF]

Andrew Dillon and Don Turnbull

Keywords

information architecture, web design, world-wide web, interaction design, user experience, information design

Cite As

Andrew Dillon & Don Turnbull (2006). Information Architecture. Encyclopedia of Library and Information Science, 2006 Edition. Taylor & Francis.

Introduction

Information architecture has become one of the latest areas of excitement within the library and information science (LIS) community, largely resulting from the recognition it garners from those outside of the field for the methods and practices of information design and management long seen as core to information science.

The term, information architecture (IA), was coined by Richard Wurman in 1975 to describe the need to transform data into meaningful information for people to use, a not entirely original idea, but cer- tainly a first-time conjunction of the terms into the now common IA label. Building on concepts in archi- tecture, information design, typography, and graphic design, Wurman’s vision of a new field lay dormant for the most part until the emergence of the World Wide Web in the 1990s, when interest in information organization and structures became widespread. The term came into vogue among the broad web design community as a result of the need to find a way of communicating shared interests in the underlying organization of digitally accessed information.

Excerpt

Research Issues in IA

Pure research in IA is rare, the field borrowing more from outside as needed than tackling research ques- tions directly. However, as the process of IA has become structured and recognized, dedicated research for IA is beginning to take form, driven largely by practitioners seeking answers to design questions.
The major theme in IA research is the study of navigation and how people find what they are looking for in an information space. From concerns with labeling and menu structures to the development of models of navigation behavior there are now significant research publications dealing with topics of direct relevance to IA.[10,11] True, most of this work is still borrowed from outside, but this is subject to change as more academic researchers become involved in the field.

There is also significant work that extends examina- tions of navigation into areas such as the perception of information shape or the emergence of web genres and their exploitation for design.[7,12] This research aims to uncover the interaction between various structural forms of information space and the user, employing a socio-cognitive based analytical approach to explain- ing and predicting use.

Another central theme for IA research is search behavior and the underlying design of efficient search mechanisms. Again, this research not only draws on the history of such work for information retrieval but also contains new contributions dealing with faceted metadata and image databases.[13–15]

Indeed, it is difficult to bound work exclusively as the province of IA because concerns with organization of information and user search and navigation of information spaces have such a long history. It is likely that for the foreseeable future, IA will remain a net borrower of intellectual research from other disciplines until such time as dedicated venues for IA research publications emerge. That said, the need to understand how best to design and implement IAs will remain an important driver of research work.

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Personalized Search

Personalized Search: A Contextual Computing Approach May Prove a Breakthrough in Personalized Search Efficiency

[PDF]

James Pitkow, Hinrich Schuetze, Todd A. Cass, Rob Cooley, Don Turnbull, Andy Edmonds, Eytan Adar, et al.

Abstract

A contextual computing approach may prove a breakthrough in personalized search efficiency.

Excerpt

Contextual computing refers to the enhancement of a user’s interactions by understanding the user, the context, and the applications and information being used, typically across a wide set of user goals. Contextual computing is not just about modeling user preferences and behavior or embedding computation everywhere, it’s about actively adapting the computational environment – for each and every user – at each point of computation. (p 50)

The Outride system was designed to be a generalized architecture for the personalization of search across a variety of information ecologies.(p 52)

Search Engine - Average Task Completion Time in Seconds

While the results may seem overwhelmingly in favor of Outride, there are some issues to interpret. First, some of the scenarios contained tasks directly supported by the functionality provided by the Outride system, creating an advantage against the other search engines. Indeed, Outride features are specifically designed to understand users, provide support by the conceptual model and tasks users employ to search the Web, and to contextualize the application of search. This is the goal of contextual computing and why personalizing search makes sense.

Second, while the use of default profiles could have provided an advantage for Outride, it also could have negatively influenced the outcome, as the profile did not represent the test participants’ actual surfing pat- terns, nor were the participants intimately familiar with the content of the profiles. Third, some of the gains are likely due to the user interface since the Outride sidebar remains visible to users across all interac- tions, helping to preserve context and provide quick access to core search features. For example, while search engines require users to navigate back and forth between the list of search results and specific Web pages, Outride preserves context by keeping the search results open in the sidebar of the Web browser, making the contents of each search result accessible to the user with a single click. Still, the magnitude of the difference between the Outride system and the other engines is compelling, especially given that most search engines are less than 10% better than one another. (p 54)

Keywords

information retrieval, search, information seeking, relevance feedback, personalization, contextual computing, user interfaces, search process

Cite As

Pitkow, J., Schutze, H., Cass, T., Cooley, R., Turnbull, D., Edmonds, A., et al. (2002). Personalized Search: A Contextual Computing Approach May Prove a Breakthrough in Personalized Search Efficiency. Communications of the ACM, 45(9), 50-55.

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Publications that cite this publication

Advertising Academia With Sponsored Search: an exploratory study examining the effectiveness of Google AdWords at the local and global level

[PDF]

Don Turnbull and Laura F. Bright

Abstract

An exploratory study conducted in late autumn and early winter 2006-2007 investigates the purchasing of sponsored search advertising for a major US university’s academic department. The ad campaign used Google’s AdWord service with the goal of increasing awareness of the academic department and encouraging potential graduate admissions or admissions inquiries. A behavioral model of information seeking is suggested that could be applied for selecting appropriate types of online advertising for awareness and other advertising goals. The study found little overlap between traditional, commerce-oriented online advertising methods and a general awareness campaign, as evidenced by a low click-through rate to the targeted site. Insights for future studies include increased integration with server logs, targeted site query terms and alternative awareness strategies.

Keywords

sponsored search; online advertising; search engines; behavioral model; information seeking; electronic business; Google.

Cite As

Turnbull, D. and Bright, L.F. (2008) Advertising academia with sponsored search: an exploratory study examining the effectiveness of Google AdWords at the local and global level, Int. J. Electronic Business, Vol. 6, No. 2, pp.149-171.

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New Book: Theories of Information Behavior

I am remiss in mentioning that a new book, Theories of Information Behavior, I have written a chapter for is finally out.

From the blurb:

This unique book presents authoritative overviews of more than 70 conceptual frameworks for understanding how people seek, manage, share, and use information in different contexts. A practical and readable reference to both wellestablished and newly proposed theories of information behavior, the book includes contributions from 85 scholars from 10 countries. Each theory description covers origins, propositions, methodological implications, usage, links to related conceptual frameworks, and listings of authoritative primary and secondary references. The introductory chapters explain key concepts, theory, method connections, and the process of theory development.

Check out the Table of Contents (pdf file). (I’m the last chapter in the book, it’s funny that the chapters are organized alphabetically by the title of each chapter.)

Amazon.com link to Theories of Information Behavior. American Society for Information Science & Technology Member Price is 20% off now.