A myth, reality and extremal principles of seeking in different search environments

Counter to commonly accepted views observations of interactive seeking behavior in different search environments show that a user behaves precisely in the same manner in traditional IR systems and on the Web. Unmediated users resort to the same tactics of successive search based on the principle of least effort (PLE). On the contrary, an intermediary in classical mediated searching follows the ‘principle of the guarantied result’ (PGR) rather than PLE. However, other mode of mediated search, more frequent at present time, differs from the classical one and follows PLE. A decision-theoretic model of successive search is considered; and optimal strategies of seeking are formulated for different criteria. ‘Lazy user’ behavior based on PLE and ‘responsible intermediary’ behavior based on PGR are compared with the optimal strategies. It is shown that lazy tactics usually yield suboptimal strategy under uncertainty of search environment. On the contrary, PGR-based seeking at the average is not effective.