Maintaining Consistency without Stagnation during Exploratory Search

Many real life search tasks are complex, multi-stepped processes. As people explore a search space, they want to find the most relevant information available to them while remaining oriented in the space they have already explored. This paper argues that during exploration it is important for search engines to present relevant information to their users in a way that maintains the users’ existing contexts. This means that the most relevant results should not necessarily be ranked first, but rather ranked where users expect them to occur. The paper presents a model of what people remember about search results, and shows that it is possible to invisibly merge new information into previously viewed search result lists where information has been forgotten.