Seek and You Shall Find: Design & Evaluation of a Context-Aware Interactive Search Companion

TL;DR

This paper introduces a context-aware interactive search companion that guides users to improve their search strategies and critical evaluation skills, leading to more active exploration and better performance in complex search tasks.

Contribution

It presents a novel, integrated search companion that offers real-time, context-aware tips to enhance user search behavior and literacy, tested through a user study.

Findings

Users submitted 75% more queries

Users viewed twice as many results

Improved performance in difficult search tasks

Abstract

Many users struggle with effective online search and critical evaluation, especially in high-stakes domains like health, while often overestimating their digital literacy. Thus, in this demo, we present an interactive search companion that seamlessly integrates expert search strategies into existing search engine result pages. Providing context-aware tips on clarifying information needs, improving query formulation, encouraging result exploration, and mitigating biases, our companion aims to foster reflective search behaviour while minimising cognitive burden. A user study demonstrates the companion's successful encouragement of more active and exploratory search, leading users to submit 75 % more queries and view roughly twice as many results, as well as performance gains in difficult tasks. This demo illustrates how lightweight, contextual guidance can enhance search literacy and empower users through micro-learning opportunities. While the vision involves real-time LLM adaptivity, this study utilises a controlled implementation to test the underlying intervention strategies.