Abstract
Today’s Internet search engines are highly effective in returning relevant web pages to users in fractions of seconds. Yet interactions with search engines are far from trouble free. When interacting with search engines, users experience a variety of troubles, which are still poorly understood. One particular kind of trouble stems from users’ prior knowledge about entities of interest, particularly regarding their names. This study examines how referential practice is organized in the context of search-engine interactions. It finds that, as in conversation, users employ naming in their queries to refer to entities if they can. However, when they do not know the name, or a name fails, they attempt a two-stage search: first they search for the entity name, using generic descriptions combined with image search, and second, if the name is found, they formulate subsequent queries using that name. Computer interaction analysis is used to reveal formal features of users’ referential practices from recordings of screen video with eye tracking and design recommendations for search engines are offered.
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Notes
- 1.
Tracker loses eyes for most of this excerpt.
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Acknowledgments
I thank Prasad Kantamneni of Yahoo!’s Human Perception Center Of Excellence for the use of eye-tracking facilities and help with study design.
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Moore, R.J. (2013). A Name Is Worth a Thousand Pictures: Referential Practice in Human Interactions with Internet Search Engines. In: Neustein, A., Markowitz, J. (eds) Mobile Speech and Advanced Natural Language Solutions. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6018-3_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-6018-3_10
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