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Characterizing the influence of domain expertise on web search behavior

Published: 09 February 2009 Publication History

Abstract

Domain experts search differently than people with little or no domain knowledge. Previous research suggests that domain experts employ different search strategies and are more successful in finding what they are looking for than non-experts. In this paper we present a large-scale, longitudinal, log-based analysis of the effect of domain expertise on web search behavior in four different domains (medicine, finance, law, and computer science). We characterize the nature of the queries, search sessions, web sites visited, and search success for users identified as experts and non-experts within these domains. Large-scale analysis of real-world interactions allows us to understand how expertise relates to vocabulary, resource use, and search task under more realistic search conditions than has been possible in previous small-scale studies. Building upon our analysis we develop a model to predict expertise based on search behavior, and describe how knowledge about domain expertise can be used to present better results and query suggestions to users and to help non-experts gain expertise.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    WSDM '09: Proceedings of the Second ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining
    February 2009
    314 pages
    ISBN:9781605583907
    DOI:10.1145/1498759
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    Published: 09 February 2009

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    1. domain expertise
    2. web search

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    • (2024)Disentangling Web Search on Debated Topics: A User-Centered ExplorationProceedings of the 32nd ACM Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization10.1145/3627043.3659559(24-35)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2024
    • (2024)Integrating measures of replicability into scholarly search: Challenges and opportunitiesProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3643043(1-18)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)User Characteristics in Explainable AI: The Rabbit Hole of Personalization?Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642352(1-13)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
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