Effects of emotion control and task on Web searching behavior

The study investigated how users’ emotion control and search tasks interact and influence the Web search behavior and performance among experienced Web users. Sixty-seven undergraduate students with substantial Web experience participated in the study. Effects of emotion control and tasks were found significant on the search behavior but not on the search performance. The interaction effect between emotion control and tasks on the search behavior was also significant: effects of users’ emotion control on the search behavior varied depending on search tasks. Profile analyses of search behaviors identified and contrasted the most commonly occurring profiles of search activities in different search tasks. Suggestions were made to improve information literacy programs, and implications for future research were discussed.     

High-performance FAQ retrieval using an automatic clustering method of query logs

To resolve some of lexical disagreement problems between queries and FAQs, we propose a reliable FAQ retrieval system using query log clustering. On indexing time, the proposed system clusters the logs of users’ queries into predefined FAQ categories. To increase the precision and the recall rate of clustering, the proposed system adopts a new similarity measure using a machine readable dictionary. On searching time, the proposed system calculates the similarities between users’ queries and each cluster in order to smooth FAQs. By virtue of the cluster-based retrieval technique, the proposed system could partially bridge lexical chasms between queries and FAQs. In addition, the proposed system outperforms the traditional information retrieval systems in FAQ retrieval.     

Analysis of multiple query reformulations on the web: The interactive information retrieval context

This study examines the facets and patterns of multiple Web query reformulations with a focus on reformulation sequences. Based on IR interaction models, it was presumed that query reformulation is the product of the interaction between the user and the IR system. Query reformulation also reflects the interplay between the surface and deeper levels of user interaction. Query logs were collected from a Web search engine through the selection of search sessions in which users submitted six or more unique queries per session. The final data set was composed of 313 search sessions. Three facets of query reformulation (content, format, and resource) as well as nine sub-facets were derived from the data. In addition, analysis of modification sequences identified eight distinct patterns: specified, generalized, parallel, building-block, dynamic, multitasking, recurrent, and format reformulation. Adapting Saracevic’s stratified model, the authors develop a model of Web query reformulation based on the results of the study. The implications for Web search engine design are finally discussed and the functions of an interactive reformulation tool are suggested.     

Generating suggestions for queries in the long tail with an inverted index

This paper proposes an efficient and effective solution to the problem of choosing the queries to suggest to web search engine users in order to help them in rapidly satisfying their information needs. By exploiting a weak function for assessing the similarity between the current query and the knowledge base built from historical users’ sessions, we re-conduct the suggestion generation phase to the processing of a full-text query over an inverted index. The resulting query recommendation technique is very efficient and scalable, and is less affected by the data-sparsity problem than most state-of-the-art proposals. Thus, it is particularly effective in generating suggestions for rare queries occurring in the long tail of the query popularity distribution. The quality of suggestions generated is assessed by evaluating the effectiveness in forecasting the users’ behavior recorded in historical query logs, and on the basis of the results of a reproducible user study conducted on publicly-available, human-assessed data. The experimental evaluation conducted shows that our proposal remarkably outperforms two other state-of-the-art solutions, and that it can generate useful suggestions even for rare and never seen queries.     

A reliable FAQ retrieval system using a query log classification technique based on latent semantic analysis

To obtain high performances, previous works on FAQ retrieval used high-level knowledge bases or handcrafted rules. However, it is a time and effort consuming job to construct these knowledge bases and rules whenever application domains are changed. To overcome this problem, we propose a high-performance FAQ retrieval system only using users’ query logs as knowledge sources. During indexing time, the proposed system efficiently clusters users’ query logs using classification techniques based on latent semantic analysis. During retrieval time, the proposed system smoothes FAQs using the query log clusters. In the experiment, the proposed system outperformed the conventional information retrieval systems in FAQ retrieval. Based on various experiments, we found that the proposed system could alleviate critical lexical disagreement problems in short document retrieval. In addition, we believe that the proposed system is more practical and reliable than the previous FAQ retrieval systems because it uses only data-driven methods without high-level knowledge sources.     

Zero,single, or multi? Genre of web pages through the users’ perspective

The goal of the study presented in this article is to investigate to what extent the classification of a web page by a single genre matches the users’ perspective. The extent of agreement on a single genre label for a web page can help understand whether there is a need for a different classification scheme that overrides the single-genre labelling. My hypothesis is that a single genre label does not account for the users’ perspective. In order to test this hypothesis, I submitted a restricted number of web pages (25 web pages) to a large number of web users (135 subjects) asking them to assign only a single genre label to each of the web pages. Users could choose from a list of 21 genre labels, or select one of the two ‘escape’ options, i.e. ‘Add a label’ and ‘I don’t know’. The rationale was to observe the level of agreement on a single genre label per web page, and draw some conclusions about the appropriateness of limiting the assignment to only a single label when doing genre classification of web pages. Results show that users largely disagree on the label to be assigned to a web page.     

p2pDating: Real life inspired semantic overlay networks for Web search

We consider a network of autonomous peers forming a logically global but physically distributed search engine, where every peer has its own local collection generated by independently crawling the Web. A challenging task in such systems is to efficiently route user queries to peers that can deliver high quality results and be able to rank these returned results, thus satisfying the users’ information need. However, the problem inherent with this scenario is selecting a few promising peers out of an a priori unlimited number of peers. In recent research a rather strict notion of semantic overlay networks has been established. In most approaches, peers are connected to other peers based on a rigid semantic profile by clustering them based on their contents. In contrast, our strategy follows the spirit of peer autonomy and creates semantic overlay networks based on the notion of “peer-to-peer dating”. Peers are free to decide which connections they create and which they want to avoid based on various usefulness estimators. The proposed techniques can be easily integrated into existing systems as they require only small additional bandwidth consumption as most messages can be piggybacked onto established communication. We show how we can greatly benefit from these additional semantic relations during query routing in search engines, such as Minerva, and in the JXP algorithm, which computes the PageRank authority measure in a completely decentralized manner.     

Managing web repositories in emerging economies: Case studies of browsing web directories

Over the past decade, worldwide Internet usage has grown tremendously, with the most rapid growth in some emerging economies such as Latin America and the Middle East, where people speaking different languages actively seek information on the web. Global search engines may not adequately address local users’ needs while regional web portals may lack rich web content. Different from search engines, web directories organize sites and pages into intuitive hierarchical structures to facilitate browsing. However, high-quality web directories in users’ native languages often do not exist and their development requires much domain knowledge not readily available. In this research, we proposed a novel semi-automatic approach to facilitate web repository management. We applied the approach to developing web directories in the business and health-care domains for the Spanish-speaking and Arabic-speaking communities respectively. The two directories contain respectively 4735 and 5107 unique sites and pages with a maximum depth of 5 levels. Results of experiments involving 37 native speakers show that these directories outperformed existing benchmark directories in terms of browsing effectiveness and efficiency, providing strong implications for information professionals and multinational enterprise managers.     

User satisfaction with Web-based DSS: The role of cognitive antecedents

Websites play a critical role in attracting customers and providing information to assist Web customers in decision making. Despite the importance of such systems providing a satisfactory experience, as per our knowledge no effort has been made to systematically examine the underlying causal structure among important decision related variables such as perceived effort, perceived information accuracy, perceived effectiveness, and satisfaction using Web-based decision support systems (Web-based DSS) that provide information to potential customers. In this study, we develop a conceptual model for investigating cognitive antecedents to Web users’ satisfaction in the context of Web-based DSS. The empirical examination of the research model using structural equations modeling indicates that perceived effectiveness is influenced by perceived information accuracy and effort, and in turn, has positive impact on satisfaction in using Web-based DSS. The implications of this study suggest to information managers that providing customers with highly accurate information from web sites requiring lower effort is perceived as an effective system and such perception leads to increased satisfaction.     

Online community information seeking: The queries of three communities in Southwestern Ontario

This paper presents not only mycommunityinfo.ca (MCI) as an innovative World Wide Web (WWW)-based community information (CI) site, but also how its unique approach to facilitating online CI searching on the Web reveals through empirical data how people use such information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address their everyday information needs. The geographic focus for this study is on three communities in Southwestern Ontario. MCI collects unobtrusively query data that are logged daily from its own Web site, the Web sites of three municipal governments, and one municipal agency from this region. One year’s worth of these data was supplied to determine the types of CI that are sought through Web searching. A content analysis of a large purposive sample of all of MCI’s query data reveals more specific and diverse conceptual CI needs between and within communities than those reported in other studies employing different data collection methods. As a result, using a centralized approach to online CI access via the WWW by other CI providers such as the 211 network may be a disservice to its users. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how a thorough analysis of such data may improve the informational content and overall design of municipal government Web sites. The analysis of these data also has the potential of improving current CI taxonomies.     

Multilingual document mining and navigation using self-organizing maps

One major approach for information finding in the WWW is to navigate through some Web directories and browse them until the goal pages were found. However, such directories are generally constructed manually and may have disadvantages of narrow coverage and inconsistency. Besides, most of existing directories provide only monolingual hierarchies that organized Web pages in terms that a user may not be familiar with. In this work, we will propose an approach that could automatically arrange multilingual Web pages into a multilingual Web directory to break the language barriers in Web navigation. In this approach, a self-organizing map is constructed to train each set of monolingual Web pages and obtain two feature maps, which reveal the relationships among Web pages and thematic keywords, respectively, for such language. We then apply a hierarchy generation process on these maps to obtain the monolingual hierarchy for these Web pages. A hierarchy alignment method is then applied on these monolingual hierarchies to discover the associations between nodes in different hierarchies. Finally, a multilingual Web directory is constructed according to such associations. We applied the proposed approach on a set of Web pages and obtained interesting result that demonstrates the feasibility of our method in multilingual Web navigation.     

Examining users’ knowledge change in the task completion process

This paper examines the changes of information searchers’ topic knowledge levels in the process of completing information tasks. Multi-session tasks were used in the study, which enables the convenience of eliciting users’ topic knowledge during their process of completing the whole tasks. The study was a 3-session laboratory experiment with 24 participants, each time working on one subtask in an assigned 3-session general task. The general task was either parallel or dependently structured. Questionnaires were administered before and after each session to elicit users’ perceptions of their knowledge levels, task attributes, and other task features, for both the overall task and the sub-tasks. Our results support the assumption that users’ knowledge generally increases after each search session, but there were exceptions in which a “ceiling” effect was shown. We also found that knowledge was correlated with users’ perceptions of task attributes and accomplishment. In addition, task type was found to affect several aspects of knowledge levels and knowledge change. These findings further our understanding of users’ knowledge in information tasks and are thus helpful for information retrieval research and system design.     

Web 2.0 and folksonomies in a library context

Libraries have a societal purpose and this role has become increasingly important as new technologies enable organizations to support, enable and enhance the participation of users in assuming an active role in the creation and communication of information. Folksonomies, a Web 2.0 technology, represent such an example. Folksonomies result from individuals freely tagging resources available to them on a computer network. In a library environment folksonomies have the potential of overcoming certain limitations of traditional classification systems such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH). Typical limitations of this type of classification systems include, for example, the rigidity of the underlying taxonomical structures and the difficulty of introducing change in the categories. Folksonomies represent a supporting technology to existing classification systems helping to describe library resources more flexibly, dynamically and openly. As a review of the current literature shows, the adoption of folksonomies in libraries is novel and limited research has been carried out in the area. This paper presents research into the adoption of folksonomies for a University library. A Web 2.0 system was developed, based on the requirements collected from library stakeholders, and integrated with the existing library computer system. An evaluation of the work was carried out in the form of a survey in order to understand the possible reactions of users to folksonomies as well as the effects on their behavior. The broad conclusion of this work is that folksonomies seem to have a beneficial effect on users’ involvement as active library participants as well as encourage users to browse the catalogue in more depth.     

Exploring individuals’ subjective well-being and loyalty towards social network sites from the perspective of network externalities: The Facebook case

This study aims to investigate users’ subjective well-being and loyalty towards social network sites (SNSs). Despite the growing role of network externalities in SNS continuance decisions, the SNS usage literature has paid scant attention to the relationship between network externalities, SNS identification, and users’ subjective well-being. In this study, we identify four components of network externalities: perceived network size, external prestige, compatibility, and complementarity. In the research model, both network size and external prestige are hypothesized positively to affect SNS identification. Perceived compatibility and perceived complementarity are hypothesized positively to affect user satisfaction. Satisfaction and SNS identification are hypothesized positively to affect user subjective well-being and loyalty towards the SNS. Users’ subjective well-being is hypothesized positively to affect their loyalty towards the SNS. Data collected from 615 valid users of Facebook provide strong support for most of these hypotheses. The findings indicate that perceived network size negatively affects users’ SNS identifications. Other components of network externalities have positive effects on SNS identification and satisfaction, which in turn have positive effects on users’ subjective well-being and loyalty towards SNS. Implications for theory and practice and suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

Free-form searching via web sites: Content and moving observed in the context of personal development

This empirical article focuses on information seeking—related to personal development—via World Wide Web sites. In order to obtain detailed and valid data, free-form Web searches by 15 individuals were observed and videotaped. The 687 sites visited by the informants, along with their actions therein, were examined and coded. The study explores the entity focus and origin of the viewed WWW sites, as well as the tactics of moving within and between sites. Correlations between the variables are also analysed. One of the most interesting findings was that personal resources—documents within the user’s computer—are a part of the Internet, too, when they are connected to it. This observation highlights the potential importance of researching the ways in which internal and external search for information differs, and what roles local resources have.     

An analysis of image retrieval behavior for metadata type image database

The aim of this paper was to analyze users’ behavior during image retrieval exercises. Results revealed that users tend to follow a set search strategy: firstly they input one or two keyword search terms one after another and view the images generated by their initial search and after they navigate their way around the web by using the ‘back to home’ or ‘previous page’ buttons. These results are consistent with existing Web research. Many of the actions recorded revealed that subjects behavior differed depending on if the task set was presented as a closed or open task. In contrast no differences were found for the time subjects took to perform a single action or their use of the AND operator.     

A study of the information needs of the users of a folk music library and the implications for the design of a digital library system

A qualitative study of user information needs is reported, based on a purposive sample of users and potential users of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library, a small specialist folk music library in North London. The study set out to establish what the users’ (both existing and potential) information needs are, so that the library’s online service may take them into account with its design. The information needs framework proposed by Nicholas [Nicholas, D. (2000) Assessing information needs: tools, techniques and concepts for the internet age. London: ASLIB] is used as an analytical tool to achieve this end. The demographics of the users were examined in order to establish four user groups: Performer, Academic, Professional and Enthusiast. Important information needs were found to be based on social interaction, and key resources of the library were its staff, the concentration of the collection and the library’s social nature. A collection of broad design requirements are proposed based on the analysis and this study also provides some insights into the issue of musical relevance, which are discussed.     

Multitasking during Web search sessions

A user’s single session with a Web search engine or information retrieval (IR) system may consist of seeking information on single or multiple topics, and switch between tasks or multitasking information behavior. Most Web search sessions consist of two queries of approximately two words. However, some Web search sessions consist of three or more queries. We present findings from two studies. First, a study of two-query search sessions on the AltaVista Web search engine, and second, a study of three or more query search sessions on the AltaVista Web search engine. We examine the degree of multitasking search and information task switching during these two sets of AltaVista Web search sessions. A sample of two-query and three or more query sessions were filtered from AltaVista transaction logs from 2002 and qualitatively analyzed. Sessions ranged in duration from less than a minute to a few hours. Findings include: (1) 81% of two-query sessions included multiple topics, (2) 91.3% of three or more query sessions included multiple topics, (3) there are a broad variety of topics in multitasking search sessions, and (4) three or more query sessions sometimes contained frequent topic changes. Multitasking is found to be a growing element in Web searching. This paper proposes an approach to interactive information retrieval (IR) contextually within a multitasking framework. The implications of our findings for Web design and further research are discussed.     

Conceptual navigation in knowledge management environments using NavCon

This article presents conceptual navigation and NavCon, an architecture that implements this navigation in World Wide Web pages. NavCon architecture makes use of ontology as metadata to contextualize user search for information. Based on ontologies, NavCon automatically inserts conceptual links in Web pages. By using these links, the user may navigate in a graph representing ontology concepts and their relationships. By browsing this graph, it is possible to reach documents associated with the user desired ontology concept. This Web navigation supported by ontology concepts we call conceptual navigation. Conceptual navigation is a technique to browse Web sites within a context. The context filters relevant retrieved information. The context also drives user navigation through paths that meet his needs. A company may implement conceptual navigation to improve user search for information in a knowledge management environment. We suggest that the use of an ontology to conduct navigation in an Intranet may help the user to have a better understanding about the knowledge structure of the company.     

Using the h-index to measure the quality of journals in the field of business and management

This paper considers the use of the h-index as a measure of a journal’s research quality and contribution. We study a sample of 455 journals in business and management all of which are included in the ISI Web of Science (WoS) and the Association of Business School’s peer review journal ranking list. The h-index is compared with both the traditional impact factors, and with the peer review judgements. We also consider two sources of citation data – the WoS itself and Google Scholar. The conclusions are that the h-index is preferable to the impact factor for a variety of reasons, especially the selective coverage of the impact factor and the fact that it disadvantages journals that publish many papers. Google Scholar is also preferred to WoS as a data source. However, the paper notes that it is not sufficient to use any single metric to properly evaluate research achievements.