Everyday cross-session search: How and why do people search across multiple sessions?

Abstract

We report on a survey about people's cross-session search activities in their everyday work and life. We recruited a broad range of participants (N=110) using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. The survey asked people to describe a recent task in which they searched across multiple sessions, to recall the reasons they started and stopped the most recent search session for the task, and to explain methods they used for reacquainting themselves with the task at the beginning of the most recent session. Across a broad range of tasks reported by our participants, our results show that a majority of the cross-session work tasks involved high levels of cognitive complexity, consultation with additional human information sources (in addition to search engines), and often involved multiple devices (e.g., computer and smartphone). Our analysis of reasons why people stopped and restarted search sessions extends and validates the reasons outlined in Lin and Belkin's model of Multiple Information Seeking Episodes and previous results from MacKay and Watters' study of multi-session search. We also identified methods that searchers use to re-acquaint themselves when restarting multi-session searches, and reasons why they may choose not to use any re-acquainting method. Our results update prior work and provide insights about how search systems can better support cross-session work tasks.