Exploratory search

Exploratory search is a specialization of information exploration which represents the activities carried out by searchers who are:

Consequently, exploratory search covers a broader class of activities than typical information retrieval, such as investigating, evaluating, comparing, and synthesizing, where new information is sought in a defined conceptual area; exploratorydata analysis is another example of an information exploration activity. Typically, therefore, such users generally combine querying and browsing strategies to foster learning and investigation.

Exploratory search is a topic that has grown from the fields of information retrieval and information seeking but has become more concerned with alternatives to the kind of search that has received the majority of focus (returning the most relevant documents to a Google-like keyword search). The research is motivated by questions like "what if the user doesn't know which keywords to use?" or "what if the user isn't looking for a single answer?". Consequently, research has begun to focus on defining the broader set of information behaviors in order to learn about the situations when a user is, or feels, limited by only having the ability to perform a keyword search.

In the last few years, a series of workshops has been held at various related and key events. In 2005, the Exploratory Search Interfaces workshop focused on beginning to define some of the key challenges in the field. Since then a series of other workshops has been held at related conferences: Evaluating Exploratory Search at SIGIR06 and Exploratory Search and HCI at CHI07 (in order to meet with the experts in human–computer interaction).

In March 2008, an Information Processing and Management special issue focused particularly on the challenges of evaluating exploratory search, given the reduced assumptions that can be made about scenarios of use.

In June 2008, the National Science Foundation sponsored an invitational workshop to identify a research agenda for exploratory search and similar fields for the coming years.

With the majority of research in the information retrieval community focusing on typical keyword search scenarios, one challenge for exploratory search is to further understand the scenarios of use for when keyword search is not sufficient. An example scenario, often used to motivate the research by mSpace, states: if a user does not know much about classical music, how should they even begin to find a piece that they might like. Similarly, for patients or their carers, if they don't know the right keywords for their health problems, how can they effectively find useful health information for themselves?

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