Do Users Benefit from Controlled Vocabularies in Search Interfaces?

Search providers in domains from medicine to news have long labelled documents with controlled vocabularies, to help users explore their collections. These vocabularies are expensive to build and use, however, and seem to be useful mostly for domain experts. This paper describes an on-going gaze-tracking study which asks whether users notice controlled vocabularies when they are exposed in a search interface; whether they make use of them; and whether this improves search. We also hope to learn what effect several standard search interfaces have on the use of controlled vocabularies.