Human Information Interaction: An Ecological Approach to Information Behavior

5 Five Search Strategies

5 Five Search Strategies The concept search strategy has been part of the vocabulary of human information behavior (HIB) since the earliest user studies. However, researchers only began to investigate search strategies after the development of digital technology, when the concept became a popular focus of study with the introduction of the World Wide Web. Unlike information need, which is relatively stable,1 search strategy addresses the dynamic part of the search process itself. While an information need triggers a search process, search strategies reflect the activities during the search. In addition, strategies are considered to possess a great advantage as an object of study: While they are purely cognitive in nature, they are observable because their use—that is, the activities during a search—can be observed.2 New research techniques that have been afforded by digital technology made it possible to investigate the search process itself, and thus its strategies. Because the concept search strategy is relatively concrete and observable, its definition has not raised much discussion, but researchers have attributed to it a range of interpretations and definitions and have often overlooked the need to provide their construal even when search strategies were the focus of their studies. This chapter briefly provides a few examples of some of these definitions and proposes a view on search strategies that is relevant to the design of information systems. 5.1 What Is a Search Strategy? Research into search strategies has been carried out since the late 1970s, but the interpretation of the concept search strategies has been highly fluid, and even today the concept is imbued with a plurality of meanings. HIB researchers have applied the term to signify any aspect of an information search process that lacks its own name. Most empirical researchers have also neglected to explain their understanding of the concept. 98 Chapter 5 In some cases, the investigators’ construal can be inferred from the specific search strategy they investigated. Only a few researchers provided explicit definitions for search strategies, and some others borrowed these definitions for their own studies. 5.1.1 Implicit Construal of Search Strategy Examples of search strategies that have been discovered in web searching without the support of an explicit definition of the concept show that most address specific actions in a search process and are highly concrete, mechanical, and concerned with observable actions. Only a few implicit definitions enjoy some level of abstraction. Some researchers were inconsistent in the level of abstraction of the search strategies they investigated, identifying them along a range from highly concrete to the abstract. The series of studies that Nigel Ford and his colleagues conducted is a typical example of a concrete and actions-based interpretation of the concept. Ford began his investigation of search strategies during the early period of bibliographical databases (e.g., Ford, Wood, and Walsh 1994). Examining his research reports, it seems that he understood search strategies to be the types of actions a searcher take to transform a query. A recent article about the use of search strategies provided 18 strategies (Ford, Eaglestone, and Madden 2009), such as page down, remove Boolean operators, include quotation marks, reuse part of a query, and change operators only. Other researchers—such as Martzoukou (2008) and Iivonen and White (2001)—recognized search strategies on the same level of abstraction, identifying, for example, use Boolean operators or use subject directory. The concrete level of the search strategies’ construal limits the range of their applicability because they are to a large degree determined by the technology being used. Search strategies that can be employed in best-match systems,3 for instance, are different from those in systems with ranked output.4 Moreover, some of the search strategies that were identified are based on specific technical attributes of the search system, such as the query language (e.g., include quotation marks, use subject directory) and query operators (e.g., use Boolean operators). As a result, the strategies that were discovered are pertinent to searches under the conditions in which they were discovered, but they may not be applicable to other modes of information searching, such as browsing the library shelves or asking a person for driving directions. The more abstract the level of definition, the more modes of searching it represents. A few scholars interpreted search strategies on a somewhat abstract level. An example of such approach is the study by Ramirez et al. (2002) which examined the role of computers in mediating human-to-human communication...