14 DAY TRIAL // A new research suggests that a growing percentage of people searching for information of different search engines, are looking for something entertaining, unrelated to work.
Scientists from Swansea University in Wales and the University of Erlangen in Germany presented these conclusions last week at the Human Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval (HCIR) workshop in New Brunswick, New Jersey.
They also said that if search engines could understand this phenomenon, they would be able to attract more users and drive more traffic, Technology Review reports.
Search engines help people find what they need, like a restaurant, a local business, plan a vacation of find the meaning of a certain word, and search companies evaluate their performance depending on how fast the user finds what he/she needs.
This is good for making information accessible to everyone, but unfortunately it leaves out an increasing category of searchers – those that search entertaining or funny things, every time they have a spare moment.
Daniel Tunkelang, an engineer at Google and an expert on information retrieval, says that traditionally, search engines focus on serious things and so “ It would be easy to dismiss [casual search behavior], except for the fact that people are doing it.”
There are some sites like YouTube and Amazon that already integrated a way of helping users find totally new content, adds Tunkelang.
He says that even though both sites have strong search tools for those who know what they are looking for, they also recommend information based upon what other users liked, links to content made by the same people or to similar content.
Max Wilson, a lecturer in the Future Interaction Technology Lab at Swansea University, says it could be possible to add insights about casual searching into the structure of traditional search tools.
He says that “to some extent, it's up to systems to recognize and facilitate people who are putting themselves out there with different motivations, like to have fun.
“It may be feasible, as systems like Google do already with types of target content, to track 'fun' queries and assume a little more about casual intentions.”
Wilson says that almost 90 percent of research on the Internet is serious, the kind you would do at work, so he thinks that more people are beginning to look for a short moment of entertainment and relaxation, especially since the number of the devices connected to the Internet increases daily.
This is why, he says, companies as well as researchers should come up with a way of having search engines make unexpected and fortunate discoveries.
As this “search for fun stuff” is rather a young concept, Wilson and colleagues carried out two studies, one that asked users to keep a diary of how they searched while they watched TV, and another that searched on Twitter, tweets containing words like “browse” or “explore” and came to finding “casual searching” in 2.4 million unique posts within five months-time.
David Elsweiler, a Humboldt Research Fellow in the department of computer science at the University of Erlangen, who was involved in the two studies, says that when searching casually, users were less interested in getting away from search results.
People's purposes were to find a way of producing a certain mood, that's why they used terms like “interesting”, “distracting, “entertaining” or “challenging”, for describing what they needed.
“These are very subjective descriptions, and search engines are not good at dealing with this kind of task,” Elsweiler said.
He adds that search engines that can cope with this new type of research have everything to win, especially if they find a way of being easy to use, for people who are not familiar with the precise research that is done at work.