On cognition, emotion, and interaction aspects of search tasks with different search intentions

The complex and dynamic nature of search processes surrounding information seeking have been exhaustively studied. Recent studies have highlighted search processes with different intentions, such as those for entertainment purposes or re-finding a visited information object, are fundamentally different in nature to typical information seeking intentions. Despite the popularity of such search processes on the Web, they have not yet been thoroughly explored. Using a video retrieval system as a use case, we study the characteristics of four different search task types: seeking information, re-finding a particular information object, and two different entertainment intentions (i.e. entertainment by adjusting arousal level, and entertainment by adjusting mood). In particular, we looked at the cognition, emotion and action aspects of these search tasks at different phases of a search process. This follows the common assumption in the information seeking and retrieval community that a complex search process can be broken down into a relatively small number of activity phases. Our experimental results show significant differences in the characteristics of studied search tasks. Furthermore, we investigate whether we can predict these search tasks given user's interaction with the system. Results show that we can learn a model that predicts the search task types with reasonable accuracy. Overall, these findings may help to steer search engines to better satisfy searchers' needs beyond typically assumed information seeking processes.