Searchers Seeking: What Happens When you Frustrate Searchers?
Gareth Renaud

TL;DR
This study investigates how searchers behave when frustrated, revealing that most tend to persist with their initial query rather than reformulate, which has implications for search engine interface design.
Contribution
It provides empirical evidence on searcher behavior under frustration, highlighting the need for improved support mechanisms in search interfaces.
Findings
Majority of searchers stick with initial queries when frustrated
Few searchers attempt to reformulate or try different terms
Assistance features like spelling suggestions have limited impact
Abstract
People searching for information occasionally experience difficulties finding what they want on the Web. This might happen if they cannot quite come up with the right search terms. What do searchers do when this happens? Intuitively one imagines that they will try a number of associated search terms to zero in on their intended search target. Certainly the provision of spelling suggestions and related search terms assume that frustrated searchers will use these to implement this strategy. Is this assumption correct? What do people really do? We ran an experiment where we asked people to find some relevant links, but we prevented them from using the most obvious search terms, which we termed taboo words. To make the experiment more interesting we also provided the traditional forms of assistance: spelling suggestions and related search suggestions. We assigned participants using a…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
Taxonomy
TopicsInformation Retrieval and Search Behavior · Web Data Mining and Analysis · Misinformation and Its Impacts
