Search behaviors in different task types

Personalization of information retrieval tailors search towards individual users to meet their particular information needs by taking into account information about users and their contexts, often through implicit sources of evidence such as user behaviors. Task types have been shown to influence search behaviors including usefulness judgments. This paper reports on an investigation of user behaviors associated with different task types. Twenty-two undergraduate journalism students participated in a controlled lab experiment, each searching on four tasks which varied on four dimensions: complexity, task product, task goal and task level. Results indicate regular differences associated with different task characteristics in several search behaviors, including task completion time, decision time (the time taken to decide whether a document is useful or not), and eye fixations, etc. We suggest these behaviors can be used as implicit indicators of the user's task type