Leading People to Longer Queries by Elena Agapie, Gene Golovchinsky, Pernilla Qvarfordt.
Abstract:
Although longer queries can produce better results for information seeking tasks, people tend to type short queries. We created an interface designed to encourage people to type longer queries, and evaluated it in two Mechanical Turk experiments. Results suggest that our interface manipulation may be effective for eliciting longer queries.
The researchers encouraged longer queries by varying a halo around the search box.
Not conclusive but enough evidence to ask the questions:
What does your search interface encourage?
What other ways could you encourage query construction?
How would you encourage graph queries?
I first saw this in a tweet by Gene Golovchinsky.