INFO 320: Information Needs, Searching,
and Presentation (aka… Search)
Instructor: William Jones
Email: [email protected]
TA: Brennen Smith
Email: [email protected]
Lectures: Tuesdays & Thursdays: 1:30 –
3:20 pm, MGH 238
Labs : Wed.: 1:30 - 2:20 pm, MGH 030
Today, 4.2 T
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Review essays
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4. Variations
3. Evaluations
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Short lecture
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Tech plan presentations
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Some thoughts from Mark Swenson
on Enterprise Search (2012)
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Security will be your biggest challenge
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Users believe they should be able to see everything
Speed will overcome a lot of issues
You are at the mercy of the authors / admins
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is not
understood to enterprises
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Clear concise titles
Good, clean metadata
Remove old / Irrelevant items; remove duplicates
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Variations in results presentation – the use
of landmarks
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*Dumais et al, “Stuff I’ve
Seen”
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Or something more spatial*…
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*Turetken & Sharda, 2007, Visualization of
web spaces.pdf
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A “hypertree” visualization
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Zooming in…
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View from anacubis/Google Enabled
Visual Search
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And yet… we mostly see a conventional
results listing
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With options for sorting
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“Relevance”
“Popularity”
“Date”
Format
…(what else?)
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Yesterday’s Tomorrows
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Scatter-Gather
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A dynamic kind of relevance feedback
Search clips
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Structured entry into the hidden Web
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Scatter-Gather
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Cutting, D. R., Karger, D. R., Pedersen, J. O., &
Tukey, J. W. (1992). Scatter/Gather: a cluster-based
approach to browsing large document collections.
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Initial search, then select additional
terms/documents
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Cutting et al, 1992, Scatter-Gather
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Subsequent scatter (into clusters) & then
“gather” new terms for a search
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Cutting et al, 1992, Scatter-Gather
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Results scattered into a 3rd set of clusters
(more topically focused)
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Cutting et al, 1992, Scatter-Gather
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Search Clips
*file:///C:/Users/williamj/Documents/WmsDocs/KFTF/referen
ces,%20resources,%20related%20work%20on%20PIM/articl
es%20relating%20to%20KFTF/Jones,%201998,%20Network
%20search%20access%20construct%20for%20accessing%
20webbased%20search%20services,%20Search%20Clips.htm
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A Bing Search for hotels
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http://www.bing.com/search?q=Seattle+hotels&go=
&qs=n&sk=&sc=8-14&form=QBLH
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And for flights…
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*from …
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Teevan et al., 2004, The Perfect Search
Engine Is Not Enough
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Find contact info for a professor on
sabbatical
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I: Did you know it would be there [on a page] or you just hoped it
would be there?
J: I knew that she had a very small Web page saying, “I’m here
at Harvard. Here’s my contact information.”
[…]
I: So you went to the Math department, and then what did you do
over there?
J: It had a place where you can find people, a link to the page
where you can find people and I went to that page and they had a
dropdown list of visiting faculty, and so I went to that link and I
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looked for her name and there it was.
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From Keeping Found Things Found
studies on re-finding information
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"I'm in Outlook, I'm gonna go into "Look for"
and I'm gonna put in, uhh, "currency" and
click "Find now." I: So the "Look for" is a
search bar? R: Yeah. And that didn't find it,
so I click "Clear" and then I'm gonna put in
"Money" and see if that finds it. And that
didn't find it.
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….
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So then I'm gonnaing (?) to wonder if I put it
in my Money folder. I didn't think I had, so
I'm gonna look there. I: So you didn't
remember that you had the Money folder? R:
No, I have it. I just didn't think that I had,
uhh, filed it away yet. And I definitely haven't
filed it away yet, so I'm going back to the
inbox, and then what the heck was that guy's
name?
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…
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I think this is an email that I sent to myself, so
I'm gonna sort it by sender and scroll down to
my name, where there's probably twenty five
emails. And there it is. Foreign Exchange."
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Another KFTF example
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Participant BK-129, looking for a web page,
looks first in a “Favorites” drop-down list,
clicks one favorite link for ajump to
“YouTube”, searches within this site twice,
then searches from Google (successful).
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Teleporting vs. orienteering?
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Fly to Boston
Take a cab to a restaurant in Boston
Walk to a favorite restaurant in Boston
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When you’re not sure where it is.
Stroll through downtown Boston looking for a
restaurant.
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Advantages of orienteering
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Cognitive ease
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F: Because, well I knew it was a [lab] memo and the only thing I
know about it was it was with the… Lab and I figured it would be
a click or two away from the home page, so I chose to go
navigate through the home page and it didn’t take me too long to
find publications on the lab page. I was just looking at it, it is right
there. It is under research, publications.
Sense of Location
Understanding the answer
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Rachel: I was looking for a specific file. But even when I saw its
name, I wouldn’t have known that that was the file I wanted until I
saw all of the other names in the same directory and that made
me realize what the naming scheme had been.
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Questions?
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