Abstract
Many organisms, human and otherwise, engage in path following in physical environments across a wide variety of contexts. Inspired by evidence that spatial search and information search share cognitive underpinnings, we explored whether path information could also be useful in a Web search context. We developed a prototype interface for presenting a user with the “search path” (sequence of clicks and queries) of another user, and ran a user study in which participants performed a series of search tasks while having access to search path information. Results suggest that path information can be a useful search aid, but that better path representations are needed. This application highlights the benefits of a cognitive science-based search perspective for the design of Web search systems and the need for further work on aggregating and presenting search trajectories in a Web search context.
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Lorince, J., Donato, D., Todd, P.M. (2014). Path Following in Social Web Search. In: Kennedy, W.G., Agarwal, N., Yang, S.J. (eds) Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling and Prediction. SBP 2014. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 8393. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_15
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-05579-4_15
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
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