This research investigates what information German Fairtrade coffee consumers search for during pre-purchase information seeking and to what extent information is retrieved. Furthermore, the sequence of the information search as well as the degree of cognitive involvement is highlighted. The role of labeling, the importance of additional ethical information and its quality in terms of concreten...

Queries that are not indicative of real information needs are a major problem for information retrieval systems. In this work we study how individual learning helps adaptive agents, when searching for information in a distributed environment, to modify incomplete queries in order to improve their retrieving performance. Two learning procedures, occurring in two different levels, will be propose...

Often, single query search sessions are not enough to solve complex problems or to gather sufficient information to take an informed decision. Such complex search tasks include many ordinary tasks such as planning a vacation trip, studying for a school or college exam or gathering information on a symptom or condition. Nevertheless, complex search tasks can be broken into multiple smaller speci...