Developing a Measure of Search Expertise

While search expertise has long been considered an important variable in the study of online information search, the creation of a robust measure to characterize it has eluded researchers. Instead, those wishing to measure search expertise often include a single item that asks people to indicate how often they search or for how long they have been searching. In this paper, we report initial results of a four-phase study aimed at developing a measure of search expertise. Interviews and focus groups were conducted with nine professional searchers and an inventory of items related to online search expertise was created. While participants identified a number of usual items for determining search expertise, such as prior search experience, domain knowledge and resource knowledge, they also identified a large number of items related to personality characteristics such as persistence, flexibility, curiosity, adaptability and humility. These results suggest that measuring personality characteristics in addition to experience and knowledge might help determine who will be a more successful searcher. In today's search environments, where many people describe themselves as experts, representing these types of characteristics in a measure of search expertise might allow researchers and practitioners to observe more variation in populations of interest, design more effective instruction and make better predictions about search outcomes.