Re-finding behaviour in educational search

Abstract

One of the search tasks in Web search is repeat search behaviour to find out documents that users once visited, which is called re-finding. Although there have been several works in the context of general-purpose Web search addressing the latter phenomena, the problem is usually overlooked for vertical search engines. In this work, we report re-finding and newfinding behaviours of users in an educational search context and compare results with the findings in the literature for general-purpose web search. Our analysis shows that re-finding pattern of students differs from web search drastically as only 26% of all queries indicate re-finding behaviour compared to 40% in Web.