Exploratory search is becoming more common as the web is used more increasingly as a medium for learning and discovery. Compared to traditional known-item search, exploratory search is more challenging and difficult to support because it initiates with poorly defined search goals, while the user knowledge and information-needs constantly change throughout the search process. Although informatio...

As search applications keep gathering new and diverse information sources, presenting relevant information anchored in time becomes more important. Temporal information is available in every document either explicitly, e.g., in the form of temporal expressions, or implicitly in the form of metadata. Recognizing such temporal information and exploiting it for document retrieval and presentation ...

Online search has become an increasingly important part of the everyday lives of most computer users. Generally, popular search tools support users well, however, in situations where the search problem is poorly defined, or the information seeker is unfamiliar with the problem domain, or the search task requires some exploration or the consideration of multiple perspectives, such tools may not ...

Exploratory search systems (ESSs) are search engines that help users to explore a topic of interest. A shortcoming of current evaluation methods is that they cannot be used to determine if an ESS can help the user in performing exploratory search tasks. To address this issue, we introduce our approach for designing a user-centered evaluation method for ESSs. Our method takes into account users’...

Search engines are indispensable for locating information in WWW, but encounter great difficulties in handling exploratory information seeking, where precise keywords are hard to be formulated. A viable solution is to improve efficiency and quality of exploratory search by utilizing the wisdom of crowds (i.e., taking advantage of collective knowledge and efforts from a mass of searchers who sha...

In trying to understand Exploratory Search, the community has focused on users who are working towards an information need, but who are unclear of their goal, technology, or domain of information. Our recent research, however, suggests that this definition misses perhaps the most exploratory search scenario of all scenarios where the goal is not information-oriented. We present combined evidenc...