Research On Exploratory Search Behavior Of College Student Users

Web information searching behavior is an important way for users to interact with search platform to meet the information demand or problem solving,which has become an indispensable part of daily life.With the improvement of information demand level,the task context will be more multifaceted,complexity and dynamic than ever before.Users simply carry on the "Question-Answer"(QA)search pattern can not maximize the satisfaction of their information demand,and their search pattern gradually presents the trend of "exploratory search".At present,college students are more and more dependent on Internet search for life and academic information,they become the mainstream in the exploratory information search activities.Therefore,it is very important to explore the behavior of college students' exploratory search behavior.Video analysis methods,survey questionnaires,and interview were used in this study to investigate the exploratory search behavior of 60 college students in 4 different types of exploratory search situation.The exploratory search tasks are “planning search task”,“knowledge acquisition search task”,“socialize search task” and “comparison search task”.We obtained search video data and questionnaire data through experiment.Based on video,we analysed user's both retrieval and browsing key behaviors,including query source,query words,query reconstruction,query entrance selection,browsing interruption and information encountering.Based on the questionnaire data,we analysed user's psychological experience during exploratory search,including self-cognitive,search monitoring,search emotion and search reflection.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)exploratory search behavior: In terms of query source,the query mainly came from four types: summary,task words,word associations and sliding search;Query words were abundant and extended many branch of explorations with the deepening of the search;Query reconstruction frequently appeared in the process of search;Knowledge search platform and comprehensive search platform as initial query entrances which were frequently visited,and user jumped among the subsequent search platforms frequently;The user's browsing behavior would be interrupted by some factors,such as resource inactive,resources inaccessible and unreasonable structure of web pages;The user would experience information encountering during the search.Multimedia information,social media and visualization information could stimulate the information encountering when browsing.(2)Psychological experience:self-cognition,task-cognition and search process monitoring wereinfluenced by task context.When searching“knowledge acquisition search task” and “comparison search task”,user's self-cognition and task-cognition were obviously better than searching other two tasks.When searching “socialize task”,user usually had the best monitoring experience.While searching“knowledge acquisition search task”,user's monitoring experience was worst.In addition,there were different degree of correlation among user's psychological experience during the search process.For example,search strategy cognition and search emotion were significantly related to monitoring experience.Taks-cognitive,self-cognitive and search strategy cognitive were also related to each other.