How do user opinions influence their interaction with web search results?

Understanding the influence of users' opinions on their search behavior together with their inherent biases in web search has garnered widespread interest in recent times. This is largely due to the implications of promoting critical thinking, explaining phenomena such as political polarization, or the manifestation of echo chambers. It is...

How Does Team Composition Affect Knowledge Gain of Users in Collaborative Web Search?

Studies in searching as learning (SAL) have revealed that user knowledge gain not only manifests over a long-term learning period, but also occurs in single short-term web search sessions. Though prior works have shown that the knowledge gain of collaborators can be influenced by user demographics and searching strategies in long-term...

TaskGenie: Crowd-Powered Task Generation for Struggling Search

Search tasks provide a medium for the evaluation of system performance and the underlying analytical aspects of IR systems. Researchers have recently developed new interfaces or mechanisms to support vague information needs and struggling search. However, little attention has been paid to the generation of a unified task set for evaluation...