Understanding Search Behavior of Low-Literacy & Low English Comprehension Users

This paper presents a user study based log analysis of the search behavior of low-literacy users in the developing world. It is first step towards Web search personalization for such users, which has been hindered by a paucity of appropriate data for inducing effective user models that target the real problems in information access for low literacy user population. We demonstrate the variations in the behavior of such users with the ‘typical’ user population by comparing the user actions during an Information Seeking session. The users deviated from the ‘ideal’ search behavior during the course of the information-seeking session with inefficient use of querying and subsequent navigation of the search results. We present an analysis that offers intuitions for more efficient information seeking practices for such users.