The Effects on Topic Familiarity on Online Search Behaviour and Use of Relevance Criteria

This paper presents an experimental study on the effect of topic familiarity on the assessment behaviour of online searchers. In particular we investigate the effect of topic familiarity on the resources and relevance criteria used by searchers. Our results indicate that searching on an unfamiliar topic leads to use of more generic and fewer specialised resources and that searchers employ different relevance criteria when searching on less familiar topics.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: ECIR
• Authors: Lei Wen, Ian Ruthven, Pia Borlund
• Keywords: ECIR 2006, Information Technology, Online Searchers, Relevance Criteria, Topic Familiarity