A Study On Exploratory Health Search Behavior Based On Cognitive And Log Analysis

Exploratory Search is defined as follows: users have vague informationneeds, insufficient knowledge about the search objects and are uncertain about whento end a search. Search is a continuous learning, investigation, and decision-makingprocess. Exploratory search is the hotspot and focus in the field of informationscience, human-computer interaction, cognitive science, etc. Exploratory healthsearch is an important part of the exploratory search. Studying characteristics andrules of medical exploratory search behaviors is the foundation of constructingmedical exploratory search models and establishing medical exploratory searchsystems.The study designs an exploratory health search experiment to comprehensively analyze the characteristics and rules of exploratory health search. The authorchooses30senior undergraduates as subjects and designs2different types of searchtasks for them. One is hypothesis-directed search, which involves searching forknowledge about certain diseases to improve health awareness and knowledge, andthe other is evidence-based search, which involves searching led by some symptomsin real life. From the perspective of log analysis and cognitive analysis, this articleapplies literature research, experimental method, log analysis, questionnaire andinterview to explore the comparative analysis of the exploratory health searchbehaviors between the two topics. More specifically, log analysis explores fromfollowing aspects including the beginning phase, search term, number and length ofbrowse in a phase, link depth and some other aspects. Cognitive analysis exploresfrom following aspects: the cognitive load, cognitive factors, cognitive trend,concentration distribution, cognitive processing elements, etc.The study comes up with several characteristics and rules of exploratoryhealth search. More specifically, through log analysis, the paper draws theconclusions as follows: In exploratory health search, users focus on etiology andsummary in initial stage of the evidence-based search, while users focus on summary and symptoms in initial stage of the hypothesis-directed search. Search words arefrom all aspects of medical subject. That users input small numbers of search wordsindicates that users’ search thoughts and minds mainly depend on tips of web content.Stages during which users browse most times are treatment, etiology, etc. Stageswhich have the biggest length of browse are summary, precaution, etc. In exploratoryhealth search, link depth of hypothesis-directed search is deeper than that ofevidence-based search. Users refer to professional health search service system.Users explore picture search. Besides, one stage has a circulation inside. Throughcognitive analysis, this paper finds that the users’ cognitive load is in the low grade(between2and4). Three factors including cognitive style, cognitive ability,knowledge and experience are equally important, followed by emotional factors.Exploratory health search topic’s type and difficulty have impact on user’s cognitivedepth and breadth. Users mainly focus on the stage of treatment, summary, etiologyand symptoms. Besides, this study analyzes cognitive elements including senseperception, attention, memory and thinking from the perspective of cognitivepsychology.This study summarizes and combs the characteristics and rules of medicalexploratory search behaviors, which provides some references and suggestions forthe construction of medical exploratory search models, establishment andimprovement of medical exploratory search systems and also improving users’search experiences.