The Effect of Specialized Multimedia Collections on Web Searching

Multimedia Web searching is a significant information activity for many people. Major Web search engines are critical resources in people’s efforts to locate relevant online multimedia information. It is therefore important that we understand how searchers are utilizing these Web information systems in their quest to retrieve multimedia information to design effective Web systems in support of these information needs. In this paper, we report the results of a research study evaluating the effect of separate multimedia Web collections on individual searching behavior. The AltaVista search engine has an extensive multimedia collection and uses tabs to search specific collections. The motivating questions for this research are: (1) What are the characteristics of multimedia searching on AltaVista? and (2) What are the effects on Web searching of separate multimedia collections? The results of our research show that multimedia searching is complex relative to general Web searching. Searching specific multimedia collections has reduced the complexity of audio searching, but it has not had the same effect for image and video searching. Query length and Boolean usage rates are much higher for image searching, compared to general Web searching. We discuss the implications of the research findings for the design, development and evaluation of Web multimedia retrieval systems.