Exploratory Search Missions for TREC Topics

We report on the construction of a new query log corpus that consists of 150 exploratory search missions, each of which corresponds to one of the topics used at the TREC Web Tracks 2009–2011. Involved in the construction was a group of 12 professional writers, hired at the crowdsourcing platform oDesk, who were given the task to write essays of 5000 words length about these topics, thereby inducing genuine information needs. The writers used a ClueWeb09 search engine for their research to ensure reproducibility. Thousands of queries, clicks, and relevance judgments were recorded. This paper overviews the research that preceded our endeavors, details the corpus construction, gives quantitative and qualitative analyses of the data obtained, and provides original insights into the querying behavior of writers. With our work we contribute a missing building block in a relevant evaluation setting in order to allow for better answers to questions such as: “What is the performance of today’s search engines on exploratory search?” and “How can it be improved?” The corpus will be made publicly available.