Usability Aspects of the Inside-in Approach for Ancillary Search Tasks on the Web

Given the huge amount of data available over the Web nowadays, search engines become essential tools helping users to find the information they are looking for. Nonetheless, search engines often return large sets of results which must be filtered by the users to find the suitable information items. However, in many cases, filtering is not enough, as the results returned by the engine require users to perform a secondary search to complement the current information thus featuring ancillary search tasks. Such ancillary search tasks create a nested context for user tasks that increases the articulatory distance between the users and their ultimate goal. In this paper, we analyze the interplay between such ancillary searches and other primary search tasks on the Web. Moreover, we describe the inside-in approach, which aims at reducing the articulatory distance between interleaved tasks by allowing users to perform ancillary search tasks without losing the context. The inside-in approach is illustrated by means of a case study based on ancillary searches of coauthors in a digital library, using an information visualization technique.