Temporal information searching behaviour and strategies

Abstract

Temporal aspects have been receiving a great deal of interest in Information Retrieval and related fields. Although previous studies have proposed, designed and implemented temporal-aware systems and solutions, understanding of people’s temporal information searching behaviour is still limited. This paper reports the findings of a user study that explored temporal information searching behaviour and strategies in a laboratory setting. Information needs were grouped into three temporal classes (Past, Recency, and Future) to systematically study their characteristics. The main findings of our experiment are as follows. (1) It is intuitive for people to augment topical keywords with temporal expressions such as history, recent, or future as a tactic of temporal search. (2) However, such queries produce mixed results and the success of query reformulations appears to depend on topics to a large extent. (3) Search engine interfaces should detect temporal information needs to trigger the display of temporal search options. (4) Finding a relevant Wikipedia page or similar summary page is a popular starting point of past information needs. (5) Current search engines do a good job for information needs related to recent events, but more work is needed for past and future tasks. (6) Participants found it most difficult to find future information. Searching for domain experts was a key tactic in Future search, and file types of relevant documents are different from other temporal classes. Overall, the comparison of search across temporal classes indicated that Future search was the most difficult and the least successful followed by the search for the Past and then for Recency information. This paper discusses the implications of these findings on the design of future temporal IR systems.