Post on 16-Jan-2015
description
Does history matter?
Gene GolovchinskyFX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.
@HCIR_GeneG
Thanks to: Tony Dunnigan, Jeremy Pickens, Abdigani Diriye
Can we use a record of people’s interactions with a
search system to aid memoryand sense-making?
What this talk is really about
Hasn’t Google “solved” search?
Do I feel lucky?I know what you’re thinking…
Some examples of search tasks Google isn’t very good at
Patentability searchMedical/pharmaceutical researchBusiness analysisGenealogical researcheDiscovery
Archives researchIntelligence analysisTravel planningHistorical researchAcademic researchEtc.
Why is this?
Exploratory search
InteractiveInformation seeking
Anomalous state of knowledgeEvolving information need
Often recall-oriented
What happens in exploratory search?
A personRuns a queryLooks at some documentsLearns something
… and the process continues
…but there is a lot of repetition,a lot of redundancy, and
a lot of reliance on memory
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Overlap as a function of number of queries in a session
Questions people might ask of an exploratory search tool
What queries have I run?What documents have I found?Have I seen this document before?What are the central themes?Was this query effective at finding new information?
How might we answer these?
Keep track of queries & documents for a task
Structure search in terms of this process metadata
Wait!
Doesn’t Google already use machine learning of
prior search behavior to improve results?
Bing, too!
Google/Bing and history
Web search engines record clicked-on documentsSystem aggregates clicks, adjusts document rankingsFuture searchers get higher precisionAll searchers get personalization for common queries
One key problem:Idiosyncratic information needs do not
benefit as much as common ones
A brief history of search history1970s: DIALOG let people combine queries with Boolean operators
1990s: Web Browsers keep track of visited documents
1990s: Search engines use click-through rates to affect future rankings
1997: VOIR (Golovchinsky) shows retrieval histories of documents in a session
1998: ARIADNE (Twidale and Nichols) lets people review search activity
2000: SearchPad (Bharat) lets people save and revisit queries and documents
2005: KonwlegeSea (Ahn et al.) shows prior activity on retrieved documents
2008?: Ancestry.com annotates results with info from family tree
2012: Querium (Golovchinsky et al.) reflects query/document history for exploring search results
DIALOG
DialogLockheed (1970s)
VOIRGolovchinsky (1997)
Ariadne
AriadneTwidale and Nichols (1998)
SearchPadBharat (2000)
KnowlegeSeaAhn et al. (2005)
Ancestry.com
QueriumGolovchinsky et al. (2012)
QueriumGolovchinsky et al. (2012)
In closing…
Memory is uncertain
Information needs evolve
Queries are approximations
Understanding changes
Design challenge: Help people plan future actions by understanding the present in
the context of the past
Does this picture look familiar?
Questions?
Gene GolovchinskyFXPAL
gene@fxpal.com@HCIR_GeneG
Image credits
http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2007/04/commisar-vanishes.htmlhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/torremountain/6831414535/http://www.flickr.com/photos/evelynsaenz/6716600387/in/photostream/http://www.hellaphone.com/wallpapers/Blackberry_Curve_8900_8930/paper9680http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675549808/in/set-72157606296198872/http://www.flickr.com/photos/11356857@N08/4476598482/http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~zak/cs559/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/24/article-0-12BD1A88000005DC-336_964x841.jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/uhdigital/6802789537/
ReferencesAhn, J.-W., Brusilovsky, P., and Farzan, R. (2005). Investigating users' needs and behavior for social search. In Proc. of the Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access (held in conjunction with UM’05), Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; pp. 1-12.
Bharat, K. (2000) SearchPad: Explicit Capture of Search Context to Support Web Search. In Proc. WWW2000, pp. 493-501.
Golovchinsky, G. (1997) Queries? Links? Is there a difference? In Proc. CHI 1997. ACM Press.
Golovchinsky, G., Diriye, A., and Dunnigan, T. (2012) The future is in the past: Designing for exploratory search. To appear in Proc. IIiX2012, Nijmegen, ACM Press.
Twidale, M. and Nichols, D. M. (1998) Designing interfaces to support collaboration in information retrieval. Interacting with Computers 10(2), pp. 177-193.