South-East European Research Centre (SEERC)

This talk overviews two Arts and Humanities Research Council (UK) funded projects concerning Web searching. The first, which concludes in September of 2007, is researching how the general public search for information on the Web. The second is a follow-on study, due to start in the Autumn of 2007, in which results of the concluding project will be used to research the effectiveness of meta-cognitive strategies to improve web searching, and the potential for intelligent search engine interfaces and training to apply those strategies. Both project teams include Professor Nigel Ford and Drs Eaglestone and Madden. Dr Martin Whittle is also part of the team for the fist study. Both studies are within the Department of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield. The talk will overview the original and powerful mix of methodologies deployed, in which we have combined information sciences, with temporal data modelling and data mining techniques used in chemoinformatics. We will describe the two phases of the current project. The first of these involved data mining large search engine transaction logs to derive prototypical syntactical query transformation strategies. The second involves the development of these models through collection and analysis of more holistic and semantically rich data through experimental sessions with volunteer web searchers from the general public. In particular, this second phase has allowed us to correlate search strategy with searcher characteristics (including their cognitive styles), the search problem and the success of the strategy deployed. Preliminary findings will be overviews and ways in which these prime the follow-on research and other possible projects will be discussed.