1. Helping People Find Information Better Jaime Teevan, MIT with Christine Alvarado, Mark Ackerman and David Karger

2. Search Overview: Understanding Introduction Related work Methodology What we learned – How? – Why? – Who? – So what? Directed

3. Search Overview: Understanding Introduction Related work Methodology What we learned – How? – Why? – Who? – So what?

4. Haystack: Personal Information Storage Email Web pages Files Calendar Contacts Haystack

5. Directed Search in Haystack What was that paper I read last week about Information Retrieval? Haystack

6. Directed Search in Haystack Ah yes! Thank you. Haystack

7. …Or Elsewhere Ah yes! Thank you.

8. Related Work Directed search – Lab studies [Capra03, Maglio97] – Log analysis [Broder02, Spink01] Observational studies [Malone83] Information Seeking – Marchionini, O’Day and Jeffries, Bates, Belkin, … – Evolving information need

9. Subjects: 15 CS graduate students Modified Diary Study Ten interviews each – Asked about what they had just done – 2 interviews a day – Collected over 5 days Naturalistic Study of Current Tools

10. Let Me Interview You! Email: – What’s the last email you read? What did you do with it? – Have you gone back to an email you’ve read before? – What’s the last Web page you visited? How did you get there? – Have you looked for anything on the Web? – What’s the last file you looked at? How did you get to it? – Have you looked for a file? Web: Files:

11. Two question types – Last email/file/Web page looked at – Last email/file/Web page looked for Qualitative data – Advantages Naturalistic, exploratory Gives a rich understanding Can be coded  quantitative – Drawbacks Overwhelming! Interview Questions

12. DirectedSearch Overview: Understanding Introduction Related work Methodology What we learned – How? – Why? – Who? – So what? Prefer to search in steps Because it’s easier Step size varies by person

13. Directed Search Today Target: Connie Monroe’s office number  Type into a search engine: “Connie Monroe, office number”

14. What We Observed Interviewer: Have you looked for anything on the Web today? Jim: I had to look for the office number of the Harvard professor. I: So how did you go about doing that? J: I went to the homepage of the Math department at Harvard

15. What We Observed I: So you went to the Math department, and then what did you do over there? J: It had a place where you can find people and I went to that page and they had a dropdown list of visiting faculty, and so I went to that link and I looked for her name and there it was.

16. What We Observed J: I knew that she had a very small Web page saying, “I’m here at Harvard. Here’s my contact information.”

17. Strategies Looking for Information Teleporting Orienteering

18. Why Do People Orienteer? The tools don’t work Easier than saying what you want You know where you are You know what you find

19. Easier Than Saying What You Want Describing the target is hard – Can’t – Prefer not to Habit – “Whichever way I remember first.” Search for source – E.g., Your last email search

20. You Know Where You Are Stay in known space – URL manipulation – Bookmarks – History Backtracking – Following an information scent – Never end up at a dead end

21. You Know What You Find Context gives understanding of answer “I was looking for a specific file. But even when I saw its name, I wouldn’t have known that that was the file I wanted until I saw all of the other names in the same directory…” Understanding negative results “I basically clicked on every single button until I was convinced… I don’t think that it exists…”

22. Individual Strategies Search strategies varied by individual People who pile information take small steps People who file information take big steps Where was the last email you found? – Inbox? – Elsewhere?

23. File or Pile Email Filer Piler

24. How Individuals Search For Files Filers Pilers Big steps Small steps

25.  Support orienteering Applying What We Learned Advantages to orienteering – Easier than saying what you want – You know where you are – You know what you find Individual differences in step size – Meta-info, source, flag sources with info – URL manipulation, paths apparent, all steps – Answer context, trusted sources, exhaustive – Allow for different step sizes

26. Structural Consistency Important All must be the same to re-find the information! New name

27. Do we need magic?

28. “Pick a card, any card…”

29. Case 1Case 2Case 3Case 4Case 5Case 6

30. Your Card is GONE!

31. People Forget a Lot

32. Absolute Consistency Unnecessary New name Focus on search result lists

33. Focus on Search Results Search results change a lot… – Tracked 10 queries on Google – 3 of top 10 results gone in first couple of weeks – Rate of change will increase …But people repeat queries! – Lots of re-visitation on the Web – Re-finding consistently reported as a problem

34. Re:Search Engine ?

35. Merge Old and New Results Old Merged New

36. Change Blindness http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/ChangeBlindness.htm

37. Change Blindness http://www.usd.edu/psyc301/ChangeBlindness.htm

38. We still need to be psychic!

39. Memory Study ♠Participants issued self-selected query ♠After an hour, asked to fill out a survey ♠100+ participants

40. Query Changes ♠Most changes are simple ♥Capitalization ♥Phrasing ♥Word ordering ♥Word form ♥New queries shorter ♠What about longer time horizons? ♠Recognition v. recall

41. Memorability a Function of Rank

42. Remembered Results Ranked High

43. Jaime Teevan teevan@mit.edu