Studying Extended Session Histories

While there is an increasing amount of interest in evaluating and supporting longer “search sessions”, the majority of research has focused on analysing large volumes of logs and dividing sessions according to obvious gaps between entries. Although such approaches have produced interesting insights into some different types of longer sessions, this paper describes the early results of an investigation into sessions as experienced by the searcher. During interviews, participants reviewed their own search histories, presented their views of “sessions”, and discussed their actual sessions. We present preliminary findings around a) how users understand sessions, b) how these sessions are characterised and c) how sessions relate to each other temporally.