Looking ahead by Gene Golovchinsky.
From the post:
It is reasonably well-known that people who examine search results often don’t go past the first few hits, perhaps stopping at the “fold” or at the end of the first page. It’s a habit we’ve acquired due to high-quality results to precision-oriented information needs. Google has trained us well.
But this habit may not always be useful when confronted with uncommon, recall-oriented, information needs. That is, when doing research. Looking only at the top few documents places too much trust in the ranking algorithm. In our SIGIR 2013 paper, we investigated what happens when a light-weight preview mechanism gives searchers a glimpse at the distribution of documents — new, re-retrieved but not seen, and seen — in the query they are about to execute.
The preview divides the top 100 documents retrieved by a query into 10 bins, and builds a stacked bar chart that represents the three categories of documents. Each category is represented by a color. New documents are shown in teal, re-retrieved ones in the light blue shade, and documents the searcher has already seen in dark blue. The figures below show some examples:
(…)
The blog post is great but you really need to ready the SIGIR paper in full.
Speaking of exploratory searching, is anyone working on exploratory merging?
That is where a query containing a statement of synonymy or polysemy from a searcher results in exploratory merging of topics?
I am assuming that experts in a particular domain will see merging opportunities that eluded automatic processes.
Seems like a shame to waste their expertise, which could be captured to improve a topic map for future users.
The SIGIR paper:
Looking Ahead: Query Preview in Exploratory Search
Abstract:
Exploratory search is a complex, iterative information seeking activity that involves running multiple queries, finding and examining many documents. We introduced a query preview interface that visualizes the distribution of newly-retrieved and re-retrieved documents prior to showing the detailed query results. When evaluating the preview control with a control condition, we found effects on both people’s information seeking behavior and improved retrieval performance. People spent more time formulating a query and were more likely to explore search results more deeply, retrieved a more diverse set of documents, and found more different relevant documents when using the preview. With more time spent on query formulation, higher quality queries were produced and as consequence the retrieval results improved; both average residual precision and recall was higher with the query preview present.