The Study of Search Session for Finding and Re-finding Information on the Web

[[abstract]]The rapidly increasing amount of internet resources has made search engines that are one of the most important tools for searching and accessing internet resources. Some studies have documented that people have a variety of needs to re-access and reuse information, but organizing and re-finding web information can be a problem for many users from the personal information management point of view. The majority of studies concerning on-line searching can be categorized as focusing on search engines, traditional information retrieval (IR) systems or online public access catalogue (OPAC) systems, re-finding electronic information is a common information need and problem, yet it has received less study than the research of how to search or find information. Therefore, the study attempts to sum up and compare search behavior characteristics in information finding and information re-finding by users’ web browsers use, web sites/web pages access, search terms, search queries, and search sessions level. The methods include two experimental sessions, scheduled about a week apart, search log analysis, observation, interview, and questionnaire. The results indicate that: (1) the use of search engines is a main method to find and re-find information, next to directly accessing a URL or web address, which showed participants often go directly to known resources on the web to start their searches. In addition to another way, the use of search history is a useful method when re-finding information. (2) Participants’ cost of time is decreasing slightly, but the effort of interaction is increasing when re-finding information through the analysis of search log in two sessions. (3) Finding and re-finding information does have differences, especially for search strategies, search tactics, terms selections are similarity, but the search paths of re-finding are differ from information finding. (4) For many tasks, the effectiveness of search is a discrepancy in the two sessions. The task with high frequency and high familiarity has a better performance. Beside, path tasks are all tasks that participants could easily to execute, and re-finding for exact tasks is perceived as more difficult and longer than information finding. Finally, the study provides some suggestions on improving the networked information retrieval systems, network information literacy and benefit further research.