Searchers Seeking: What Happens When you Frustrate Searchers?

People searching for information occasionally experience difficulties finding what they want on the Web. This might happen if they cannot quite come up with the right search terms. What do searchers do when this happens? Intuitively one imagines that they will try a number of associated search terms to zero in on their intended search target. Certainly the provision of spelling suggestions and related search terms assume that frustrated searchers will use these to implement this strategy. Is this assumption correct? What do people really do? We ran an experiment where we asked people to find some relevant links, but we prevented them from using the most obvious search terms, which we termed “taboo words”. To make the experiment more interesting we also provided the traditional forms of assistance: spelling suggestions and related search suggestions. We assigned participants using a magic square to get no assistance, one kind of assistance, or both. Forty eight people participated in the experiment. What emerged from the analysis was that when people are frustrated in their searching attempts, a minority soldier on, attempting to find other terms, but the majority will stick with their original query term and simply progress from page to page in a vain attempt to find something relevant. This confirms findings by other researchers about the difficulties of query reformulation. Our finding will serve to inform the developers of user interfaces to search engines, since it would be helpful if we could find a better way of supporting frustrated searchers.