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Exploring factors affecting renewal and stopping reasons in cross‐session search
Author(s) -
Li Yuan,
Capra Rob
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
proceedings of the association for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.193
H-Index - 14
ISSN - 2373-9231
DOI - 10.1002/pra2.267
Subject(s) - session (web analytics) , task (project management) , computer science , population , psychology , world wide web , engineering , medicine , environmental health , systems engineering
This study analyzes the relationships between search session renewal reasons and stopping reasons for everyday cross‐session search, and their relationships with types of needed information, the number of search sessions, and task performance stage. We present results from an online survey questionnaire distributed on the Amazon Mechanical Turk platform. Our results validate the renewal reasons from Lin and Belkin's MISE model and generalize the stopping reasons found by other empirical studies to a broader population and tasks. We found that participants in different renewal modes more often look for specific information than general information. Sessions which happened early or at the middle of a task were often renewed because a task spawned sub‐problems or transmuted. Sessions renewed near the end or after the task was done often involved looking for updated information or were renewed due to search failure. Our study has implications for predicting reasons that can cause searchers to start or stop a search session during cross session search, and on designing search support tools to provide more targeted, customized help based on the relations among those reasons.