This should be the first question of my PhD research, where I’d like to identify search task. A paper answers partially this question:
Rose, D. E., Levinson, D. 2004. Understanding User Goals in Web Search, WWW2004.
Authors give a hierarchy on Search Goals, derived by a study on Altavista queries. The three main areas of their proposed framework are:
- Navigational: the goal is to get to a website
- Informational: the goal is to learn something
- Resource: the goal is to obtain a resource (download, view, interact, obtain)
Their work is based on Broder, A. 2002. A taxonomy of web search. SIGIR Forum.
It seems that Rose is going further:
Rose, D. E. 2006. Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web, in Journal of the american society for information science and technology, 57(6):797-799.
In this recent short paper, Rose identifies the principles that should guide who is creating next search engine:
- Different interfaces should be available to match different search goals
- The interface should facilitate the selection of appropriate contexts for the search
- The interface should support the iterative nature of the search task. In particular, it should invite refinement and exploration.
[tags]web search, search goals, search tasks, rose, broder, levinson[/tags]
