Search

This article focuses on research and development opportunities to improve current Internet search interfaces so users can succeed more often in situations when they lack the knowledge or contextual awareness to formulate queries or navigate complex information spaces, the search task requires browsing and exploration, or system indexing of available information is inadequate. Most people rely on tentative queries, exploring and retrieving information, and selectively seeking and passively obtaining cues about what step to take next. Researchers are working on techniques to support these kinds of queries in what is known as "exploratory search."

The development and testing of systems to support users engaged in exploratory search activities (i.e., searches where the target may be undefined) is an challenge for the online search community. In this article we report on a workshop on exploratory search issues organized in conjunction with the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory's Annual Symposium and Open House in June 2005. This workshop brought together researchers from the fields of Information Seeking (IS), Information Retrieval (IR), Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Information Visualization (IV) for a cross-disciplinary exploration of these and other issues. Although originally intended to focus on interfaces to support exploratory search the workshop blossomed into a rich discussion of not only interface issues, but also evaluation, the cognitive processes that underlie information exploration and research methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]