Reading Notes For Week 4

MIR   Chapter 2.1-2.5.3

1. How users go about doing search tasks? Usually four main cycle activities: problem identification, articulation of information needs, query formulation and results evaluation.
2. The standard model of the information seeking process is out of date. Because the users learn as they search, the models should emphasize the dynamic nature of the search process. Thus, the information is adjusted as the retrieval results came up.
3. Many search engines allow users to peruse an information structure of some kind to select a starting point for search, however, I think the user is prefer to browsing with less recall, and see what the search engine returns.
4. According to the search, the less expert the users are about a topic, the more likely they are to feel confident that all of the relevant information has been accessed.
5. Web search engines have become more sophisticated about dropping term that would result in empty results.
6. An increasingly common strategy within the search form is to show hints about what kind of information should be entered into each form via greyed-out text. For instance, on the search box, the first box is labeled “what are you looking for?” while the second box is labeled “when (tonight, this weekend, ...)”. When the user places the cursor into the entry form, the grey text disappears, and the user can type in their query terms.
7. Since relevance feedback indicates which documents are relevant to the query, this method is able to help greatly improve rank ordering.