Where Do All These Search Terms Come From? - Two Experiments in Domain-Specific Search

TL;DR

This paper investigates the sources of search terms used by users during search sessions, revealing that many terms are derived from previous interactions with the search interface, through two experiments involving eye tracking and log analysis.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence on how users generate search terms, highlighting the influence of the search interface and previous exposure in term formulation.

Findings

Many search terms are explicitly seen or shown before on the interface.

User-generated ideas for search terms are limited compared to outside sources.

The search system interface plays a significant role in shaping search term variations.

Abstract

Within a search session users often apply different search terms, as well as different variations and combinations of them. This way, they want to make sure that they find relevant information for different stages and aspects of their information task. Research questions which arise from this search ap- proach are: Where do users get all the ideas, hints and suggestions for new search terms or their variations from? How many ideas come from the user? How many from outside the IR system? What is the role of the used search sys- tem? To investigate these questions we used data from two experiments: first, from a user study with eye tracking data; second, from a large-scale log analy- sis. We found that in both experiments a large part of the search terms has been explicitly seen or shown before on the interface of the search system.