Helping People Find Information Better

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Helping People Find Information Better

• Jaime Teevan, MIT

with Christine Alvarado, Mark Ackerman and David
Karger
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OverviewUnderstanding
Search
Directed

• Introduction
• Related work
• Methodology
• What we learned
• How?
• Why?
• Who?
• So what?

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OverviewUnderstanding
Directed
Search

• Introduction
• Related work
• Methodology
• What we learned
• How?
• Why?
• Who?
• So what?

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HaystackPersonal Information Storage
Web pages
Email
Files
Calendar
Contacts
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Directed Search in Haystack
What was that paper I read last week about
Information Retrieval?
Haystack
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Directed Search in Haystack
Ah yes! Thank you.
Haystack
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Or Elsewhere
Ah yes! Thank you.
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Related Work

• Directed search
• Lab studies Capra03, Maglio97
• Log analysis Broder02, Spink01
• Observational studies Malone83
• Information Seeking
• Marchionini, ODay and Jeffries, Bates, Belkin,
• Evolving information need

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Naturalistic Study of Current Tools

• Subjects 15 CS graduate students
• Modified Diary Study
• Ten interviews each
• Asked about what they had just done
• 2 interviews a day
• Collected over 5 days

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Let Me Interview You!

• Email

• Whats the last email you read? What did you do
  with it?
• Have you gone back to an email youve read
  before?

• Web

• Whats the last Web page you visited? How did
  you get there?
• Have you looked for anything on the Web?

• Files

• Whats the last file you looked at? How did you
  get to it?
• Have you looked for a file?

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Interview Questions

• Two question types
• Last email/file/Web page looked at
• Last email/file/Web page looked for
• Qualitative data
• Advantages
• Naturalistic, exploratory
• Gives a rich understanding
• Can be coded ? quantitative
• Drawbacks
• Overwhelming!

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OverviewUnderstanding
Directed
Search

• Introduction
• Related work
• Methodology
• What we learned
• How?
• Why?
• Who?
• So what?

Prefer to search in steps Because its
easier Step size varies by person
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Directed Search Today

• Target Connie Monroes office number

? Type into a search engine Connie Monroe,
office number
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What We Observed
Interviewer Have you looked for anything on the
Web today? Jim I had to look for the office
number of the Harvard professor.
I So how did you go about doing that? J I
went to the homepage of the Math department at
Harvard
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What We Observed
I So you went to the Math department, and then
what did you do over there? J It had a place
where you can find people and I went to that page
and they had a dropdown list of visiting faculty,
and so I went to that link and I looked for her
name and there it was.
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What We Observed

• J I knew that she had a very small Web page
  saying, Im here at Harvard. Heres my contact
  information.

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Strategies Looking for Information
Teleporting
Orienteering
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Why Do People Orienteer?

• The tools dont work
• Easier than saying what you want
• You know where you are
• You know what you find

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Easier Than Saying What You Want

• Describing the target is hard
• Cant
• Prefer not to
• Habit
• Whichever way I remember first.
• Search for source
• E.g., Your last email search

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You Know Where You Are

• Stay in known space
• URL manipulation
• Bookmarks
• History
• Backtracking
• Following an information scent
• Never end up at a dead end

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You Know What You Find

• Context gives understanding of answer
• I was looking for a specific file. But even
  when I saw its name, I wouldnt have known that
  that was the file I wanted until I saw all of the
  other names in the same directory
• Understanding negative results
• I basically clicked on every single button
  until I was convinced I dont think that it
  exists

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Individual Strategies

• Search strategies varied by individual
• People who pile information take small steps
• People who file information take big steps

• Where was the last email you found?

• Inbox?
• Elsewhere?

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File or Pile Email
Filer
Piler
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How Individuals Search For Files
Filers
Big steps
Pilers
Small steps
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Applying What We Learned

• ? Support orienteering

• Advantages to orienteering
• Easier than saying what you want
• You know where you are
• You know what you find
• Individual differences in step size

• Meta-info, source, flag sources with info

• URL manipulation, paths apparent, all steps

• Answer context, trusted sources, exhaustive

• Allow for different step sizes

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Structural Consistency Important
All must be the same to re-find the information!
New name
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Do we need magic?
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Pick a card, any card
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Abracadabra!
Case 1 Case 2 Case 3 Case 4 Case 5 Case 6
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Your Card is GONE!
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People Forget a Lot
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Absolute Consistency Unnecessary
New name
Focus on search result lists
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Focus on Search Results

• Search results change a lot
• Tracked 10 queries on Google
• 3 of top 10 results gone in first couple of weeks
• Rate of change will increase
• But people repeat queries!
• Lots of re-visitation on the Web
• Re-finding consistently reported as a problem

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ReSearch Engine
?
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Merge Old and New Results
Old
Merged
New
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Change Blindness
http//www.usd.edu/psyc301/ChangeBlindness.htm
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Change Blindness
http//www.usd.edu/psyc301/ChangeBlindness.htm
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We still need to be psychic!
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Memory Study

• Participants issued self-selected query
• After an hour, asked to fill out a survey
• 100 participants

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Query Changes

• Most changes are simple
• Capitalization
• Phrasing
• Word ordering
• Word form
• New queries shorter
• What about longer time horizons?
• Recognition v. recall

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Memorability a Function of Rank
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Remembered Results Ranked High
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Thank you!

• Jaime Teevan
• teevan_at_mit.edu