An Investigation of the Query Behavior in Task-based Collaborative Exploratory Web Search

Collaboration in the information seeking and retrieval environment is common, particularly when the search task is complex and exploratory. Multiple factors such as contextual features and task type can affect users’ query behavior. This paper presents a study investigating the effects of collaboration and task types on users’ query behavior. The study involves two conditions: collaborative search and individual search, and the two search tasks: the recall-oriented information-gathering and the utility-based decision-making. We analyze users’ query behavior in three dimensions: basic query features (e.g. the number of queries), query reformulation patterns (e.g. New, Specification, Generalization and Reconstruction) and query performance. The findings of this study reveal that queries are more diverse in collaborative search and recalloriented tasks. Users employed New and Specialization more often as query reformulation types in collaborative search while people in individual search use Reconstruction more often. Besides, the successful query rate is higher in individual search and recall-oriented tasks.