Search and Navigation Based on the paper, “Improved Search Engines and Navigation Preference in Personal Information Management” Ofer Bergman, Ruth Beyth-Marom, Rafi Nachmias, Noa Gradovitch, Steve Whittaker ACM Transactions on Information Systems Vol 26, No 4 Article 20, September 2008

Locating files  How do you find a file on your computer  Navigation through the hierarchical directory system?  Search?  Some combination?  What do you do?  If more than one, when do you do each kind of finding?

Personal Information Management  “An activity in which an individual stores his/her personal information items in order to retrieve and use them later.”  “Such information items include files, s, Web favorites, contacts, and notes.”  What else might we include in that list?

Basic file structures  We see our file storage structure through a virtual organization presented by the OS interface.  The hierarchical structure of items in folders and folders in directories  First introduced in the Multics system in the 1960s  Applied to unix and linux  Then Xerox Star  Apple Mac  Microsoft Windows  Based on the familiar office metaphor of a file cabinet.

Search and Navigation  Navigation requires a predictable structure.  You take clues from what you see and follow paths that appear to take you closer to your goal.  Two phase, according to the paper:  Manually traverse their organizational hierarchy to reach the directory or folder where the item is stored  Locate the desired item within the directory or folder, possibly using a sorting tool to order things for easier review.  Search is independent of real or virtual organization.  Search term is matched to a goal, which is located by a pointer.

Navigation  Classification of information can hide it from the user  What does this mean to you?  How does it “reduce the chances of quick retrieval or reminding”?  Categorization is cognitively challenging  What do you do with something that logically belongs in two or more different places?  Retrieval requires recall of how the information was classified.  Note the study -- “users with many categories found it harder to file and were more likely to create spurious unused folders.”

Search  Given the difficulties associated with categorization and navigation,  Assumption made that search would be preferred  Search  is more flexible and efficient at retrieval  does not require remembering storage locations or classification decisions.  Bypasses the organizational problem  You don’t have to decide on a way to organize things. You just specify enough information to identify what you are looking for and the search tool finds it for you.

Another consideration  Is there something missing from the discussion so far?  Navigation requires categorization on storing and recalling categories when retrieving  Search does not require any type of organization when storing and allows retrieval if you can specify appropriate characteristics of what you are looking for.  ….. ????

Another consideration  Is there something missing from the discussion so far?  Navigation requires categorization on storing and recalling categories when retrieving  Search does not require any type of organization when storing and allows retrieval if you can specify appropriate characteristics of what you are looking for.  What about the view of “neighbors” to the item you are looking for?

The research  Two research questions:  Retrieval: “Search is more efficient and flexible for retrieval, thus improved quality of search iegines should lead to a substantial increase in file search and eventually a preference for search over navigation.”  File Organization: “Users are known to have problems organizing files effectively for retrieval. Search allows retrieval without such manual organization and improved search should lead to a reduced use of filing strategies in preparation for later retrieval.  What do you think about these questions? What results would you expect, if you explored these questions among your friends and colleagues? See paper for citations of relevant sources for these expectations.

Desktop search improvements  Desktop search tools have improved.  Cross-format search. You can now find materials from files and messages and instant messages and web history all from one search tool  Faster retrieval. Some cases of 1000 times faster than older versions.  User-centered design. Change of emphasis from an interface that made things easier (and faster) for the system to features that are easier for the user (though more difficult for the system.  Incremental search. The search begins as soon as you type the first character. That means you can stop typing as soon as you see what you are looking for.

Demonstration and discussion  My directory system and my options with navigation and search on this Mac (OS X )  Someone have a PC we can look at?  Experiences with Google mail -- hierarchical folders vs. search

The study

Search engine features  Interestig side note: range of age of the Mac users: 15 to 87 for Spotlight, 15 to 93 for Sherlock! (Windows range from 15 to 55)

 Note that 37% of Windows users had removed Google Desktop from their systems by the time of the followup - 7 months later.

Remembering location

When we use search  When we cannot remember where the file is.  The experiment resulted in the conclusion that improved search engines have had very little affect on the way people locate files on their computers.

Some conclusions, questions from the authors  Possible explanations of preference for navigation over search  Consistency: Hierarchical organization always looks the same. Navigation always proceeds the same way. Search results may appear in different order or with different items in the list.  Recognition vs. Recall: Recognition tasks are easier. Navigation tasks are based on recognition. Information addressability -- partial information about the desired result is required by both navigation and search. Is there a preference for the type of information addressability required for navigation over that required for search?

Conclusions and questions - 2  Procedural vs. Declarative memory. Search requires declarative memory -- you must know a characteristic of the search goal. Navigation depends more on procedural memory -- we know how to get to what we want, even if we don’t know exactly where it is.  Cognitive Automation: Since the user created the hierarchical arrangement of the materials, less cognitive attention is required to navigate it. Some of this becomes automatic, requiring very little user attention.  Strength of the location metaphor: We are used to puttig things in their place and finding them there when we need them again. In PIM, “the same user both organizes and retrieves the information.”

Some thoughts, questions  Saving a file requires specifying a location.  We could just dump everything into one folder or the desktop, but are we conditioned to be more organized than that?  Having done some sort of organization to store a file, are we likely to think about that organization when retrieving it?