Abstract
The complexity of search tasks has been shown to be an important factor in searchers’ ability to find relevant information and their satisfaction with the performance of search engines. In user evaluations of search engines an understanding of how task complexity affects search behaviour is important to properly understand the results of an evaluation. In this paper we examine the issue of search task complexity for the purposes of evaluation. In particular we concentrate on the searchers’ ability to recognise the internal complexity of search tasks, how complexity is affected by task design, and how complexity affects the success of searching.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Beaulieu, M.: Experiments with interfaces to support query expansion. Journal of Documentation 53(1), 8–19 (1997)
Belkin, N.J., Brooks, H.M., Oddy, R.N.: Ask for information retrieval. Journal of Documentation 38(2), 61–71 (1982)
Borlund, P.: Experimental components for the evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems. Journal of Documentation 56(1), 71–90 (2000)
Borlund, P.: The IIR evaluation model: a framework for evaluation of interactive information retrieval systems. Information Research 8(3) (2003)
Buckland, M.K., Florian, D.: Expertise, task complexity, and artificial intelligence: A conceptual framework. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42(9), 635–643 (1991)
Byström, K., Järvelin, K.: Task complexity affects information seeking and use. Information Processing and Management 31(2), 191–213 (1995)
Campbell, D.: Task complexity: a review and analysis. Academy of Management Review 13, 40–52 (1988)
Hersh, W., Over, P.: The TREC 2001 interactive track NIST Special Publication 500-250: The Tenth Text Retrieval Conference (TREC 2001), p. 38 (2002)
Ingwersen, P.: Information retrieval interaction. Taylor Graham, London (1992)
Kelliher, C.: An empirical investigation of the effects of personality type and variation in information load on the information search strategies employed by decision-makers. Texas A&M University Ph.D (1990)
Vakkari, P.: Task complexity, information types, search strategies and relevance: integrating studies on information seeking and retrieval. Information Processing and Management 35(6), 819–837 (1999)
White, R.W., Jose, J.M., Ruthven, I.: A task-oriented study on the influencing effects of query-biased summarisation in web searching. Information Processing and Management 39(5), 707–733 (2003)
White, R., Ruthven, I., Jose, J.: Finding relevant documents using top-ranking sentences: an evaluation of two alternative schemes. In: Proceedings of the 25th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference (SIGIR 2002), Tampere, pp. 57–64 (2002)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2004 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bell, D.J., Ruthven, I. (2004). Searcher’s Assessments of Task Complexity for Web Searching. In: McDonald, S., Tait, J. (eds) Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 2997. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24752-4_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24752-4_5
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-21382-6
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-24752-4
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive