The role of expertise in aiding video search

The importance of expertise for effective video search is not well understood. To address this problem we investigate the role of expertise in video search. In our evaluation participants were given a number of video search topics and asked to find relevant videos using two different interfaces. The first interface required users to use background knowledge to find relevant videos and the second allowed users to use video search tools to solve the task in hand. Three groups of users with varying search expertise carried out video search tasks, with the intention that the behaviour and success of the different user groups could be examined and compared. It was found that the behaviour of novice users begins to mirror that of the expert users as they gain more background knowledge. However, it was also found that the novice perceptions, even with additional background knowledge, of the tools, collection and performance do not always match that of the expert users. A more complete theory-led understanding of these results would assist workers in a whole range of video-related professions as well as normal users of the Web.