Query Suggestions Help Users Get Unstuck

Several papers at the HCIR09 workshop touched on the topic of query suggestions. Chirag Shah and Gary Marchionini presented a poster about query reuse in exploratory search tasks and Diane Kelly presented results from two different studies that examined people’s use of query suggestions and how usage varied depending on topic difficulty. (Their papers are available for download as part of the proceedings from the workshop.)

According to Shah and Marchionini users often search for the same things. They reuse their previous queries e.g. search for the same things multiple times. Users use their previous searches to refind information and also to expand or further filter their previous searches by adding one or more keywords. There is also a significant overlap between what different users search for suggesting that users have a tendency to express their information needs in similar ways. These results support the idea that query suggestions can be used to help users formulate their query.  Yahoo and YouTube  are two of the systems that uses this technique, where users get suggestions of queries and how they can add more words to their query based on what other users have searched for.

Diane Kelly concludes that users use query suggestion both by typing in the same thing as shown in the suggestion and by clicking on it. Users also tend to use more query suggestions when searching for difficult topics. Query suggestions help users get “unstuck” when they are searching for information.  It is however hard to know whether query suggestions actually return better results. The users expectation and preferences do have an effect on user satisfaction as well. User generated query suggestions are also found to be better than query suggestions generated by the search system. So the mere expectation that the query suggestions will help a user could have an positive effect on his or hers experience…

Query suggestions are meant to help the users formulate a good query that will provide them with relevant results. Query suggestions can also work as with yahoo search where query suggestions both suggest more words to add to the query but also provides the users with suggestions for other related concepts to search for. So searching for Britney Spears will for example suggest the related search for Kevin Federline (even though they are now divorced) and searching for enterprise search will suggest concepts such as relevance, information management and off course the names of the different search vendors.

If you apply this to the enterprise search setting the query suggestion could provide the user with several different kinds of help. Combining the user’s previous searches with things other users searched for but also providing suggestions for recommended queries or concepts. The concepts will be high quality information and suggestions controlled by the team managing the search application. It is a way of combining quick links or best bets with query suggestions and a way to hopefully improve the experienced value of the query suggestions. The next step then is to work with these common queries that users search for and make sure that they return relevant results, but that is an entirely different topic…