does history matter?

Does history matter?

Gene GolovchinskyFX Palo Alto Laboratory, Inc.

@HCIR_GeneG

Thanks to: Tony Dunnigan, Jeremy Pickens, Abdigani Diriye

Can we use a record of people’s interactions with a

search system to aid memoryand sense-making?

What this talk is really about

Hasn’t Google “solved” search?

Do I feel lucky?I know what you’re thinking…

Some examples of search tasks Google isn’t very good at

Patentability searchMedical/pharmaceutical researchBusiness analysisGenealogical researcheDiscovery

Archives researchIntelligence analysisTravel planningHistorical researchAcademic researchEtc.

Why is this?

Exploratory search

InteractiveInformation seeking

Anomalous state of knowledgeEvolving information need

Often recall-oriented

What happens in exploratory search?

A personRuns a queryLooks at some documentsLearns something

… and the process continues

…but there is a lot of repetition,a lot of redundancy, and

a lot of reliance on memory

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Overlap as a function of number of queries in a session

Questions people might ask of an exploratory search tool

What queries have I run?What documents have I found?Have I seen this document before?What are the central themes?Was this query effective at finding new information?

How might we answer these?

Keep track of queries & documents for a task

Structure search in terms of this process metadata

Wait!

Doesn’t Google already use machine learning of

prior search behavior to improve results?

Bing, too!

Google/Bing and history

Web search engines record clicked-on documentsSystem aggregates clicks, adjusts document rankingsFuture searchers get higher precisionAll searchers get personalization for common queries

One key problem:Idiosyncratic information needs do not

benefit as much as common ones

A brief history of search history1970s: DIALOG let people combine queries with Boolean operators

1990s: Web Browsers keep track of visited documents

1990s: Search engines use click-through rates to affect future rankings

1997: VOIR (Golovchinsky) shows retrieval histories of documents in a session

1998: ARIADNE (Twidale and Nichols) lets people review search activity

2000: SearchPad (Bharat) lets people save and revisit queries and documents

2005: KonwlegeSea (Ahn et al.) shows prior activity on retrieved documents

2008?: Ancestry.com annotates results with info from family tree

2012: Querium (Golovchinsky et al.) reflects query/document history for exploring search results

DIALOG

DialogLockheed (1970s)

VOIRGolovchinsky (1997)

Ariadne

AriadneTwidale and Nichols (1998)

SearchPadBharat (2000)

KnowlegeSeaAhn et al. (2005)

Ancestry.com

QueriumGolovchinsky et al. (2012)

QueriumGolovchinsky et al. (2012)

In closing…

Memory is uncertain

Information needs evolve

Queries are approximations

Understanding changes

Design challenge: Help people plan future actions by understanding the present in

the context of the past

Does this picture look familiar?

Questions?

Gene GolovchinskyFXPAL

gene@fxpal.com@HCIR_GeneG

Image credits

http://hjhop.blogspot.com/2007/04/commisar-vanishes.htmlhttp://www.flickr.com/photos/torremountain/6831414535/http://www.flickr.com/photos/evelynsaenz/6716600387/in/photostream/http://www.hellaphone.com/wallpapers/Blackberry_Curve_8900_8930/paper9680http://www.flickr.com/photos/normanbleventhalmapcenter/2675549808/in/set-72157606296198872/http://www.flickr.com/photos/11356857@N08/4476598482/http://www.cslu.ogi.edu/~zak/cs559/http://i.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2012/04/24/article-0-12BD1A88000005DC-336_964x841.jpghttp://www.flickr.com/photos/uhdigital/6802789537/

ReferencesAhn, J.-W., Brusilovsky, P., and Farzan, R. (2005). Investigating users' needs and behavior for social search. In Proc. of the Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access (held in conjunction with UM’05), Edinburgh, Scotland, UK; pp. 1-12.

Bharat, K. (2000) SearchPad: Explicit Capture of Search Context to Support Web Search. In Proc. WWW2000, pp. 493-501.

Golovchinsky, G. (1997) Queries? Links? Is there a difference? In Proc. CHI 1997. ACM Press.

Golovchinsky, G., Diriye, A., and Dunnigan, T. (2012) The future is in the past: Designing for exploratory search. To appear in Proc. IIiX2012, Nijmegen, ACM Press.

Twidale, M. and Nichols, D. M. (1998) Designing interfaces to support collaboration in information retrieval. Interacting with Computers 10(2), pp. 177-193.