Re-Finding Found Things: An Exploratory Study of How Users Re-Find Information
Robert G. Capra, Manuel A. Perez-Quinones

TL;DR
This study investigates how users re-find information on the web through a controlled experiment, highlighting strategies like iterative searching and the significant role of annotations in aiding re-finding.
Contribution
It provides new insights into re-finding behaviors, emphasizing the importance of annotations and the two-stage process of locating and browsing for information.
Findings
Re-finding is a two-stage, iterative process involving search and browse.
Annotations are extensively used and facilitate re-finding.
Strategies align with waypoints and navigation approaches in electronic spaces.
Abstract
The problem of how people find information is studied extensively; however, the problem of how people organize, re-use, and re-find information that they have found is not as well understood. Recently, several projects have conducted in-situ studies to explore how people re-find and re-use information. Here, we present results and observations from a controlled, laboratory study of refinding information found on the web. Our study was conducted as a collaborative exercise with pairs of participants. One participant acted as a retriever, helping the other participant re-find information by telephone. This design allowed us to gain insight into the strategies that users employed to re-find information, and into how domain artifacts and contextual information were used to aid the re-finding process. We also introduced the ability for users to add their own explicitly artifacts in the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsPersonal Information Management and User Behavior · Information Retrieval and Search Behavior · Data Quality and Management
