Composite web search

The figure above shows Google’s results page for the query “taylor swift”, captured in March 2016. Assembled around the long-established list of search results is content extracted from various source — news items and tweets merged within the results ranking, images, songs and social media profiles displayed to the right of the ranking, in an interface element that is known as an entity card. Indeed, the entire page seems more like an assembly of content extracted from various sources, rather than just a ranked list of blue links. Search engine result pages have become increasingly diverse over the past few years, with most commercial web search providers responding to user queries with different types of results, merged within a unified page. The primary reason for this diversity on the results page is that the web itself has become more diverse, given the ease with which creating and hosting different types of content on the web is possible today. This thesis investigates the aggregation of web search results retrieved from various document sources (e.g., images, tweets, Wiki pages) within information “objects” to be integrated in the results page assembled in response to user queries. We use the terms “composite objects” or “composite results” to refer to such objects, and throughout this thesis use the terminology of Composite Web Search (e.g., result composition) to distinguish our approach from other methods of aggregating diverse content within a unified results page (e.g., Aggregated Search). In our definition, the aspects that differentiate composite information objects from aggregated search blocks are that composite objects (i) contain results from multiple sources of information, (ii) are specific to a common topic or facet of a topic rather than a grouping of results of the same type, and (iii) are not a uniform ranking of results ordered only by their topical relevance to a query. The most widely used type of composite result in web search today is the entity card. Entity cards have become extremely popular over the past few years, with some informal studies suggesting that entity cards are now shown on the majority of result pages generated by Google. As composite results are used more and more by commercial search engines to address information needs directly on the results page, understanding the properties of such objects and their influence on searchers is an essential aspect of modern web search science. The work presented throughout this thesis attempts the task of studying composite objects by exploring users’ perspectives on accessing and aggregating diverse content manually, by analysing the effect composite objects have on search behaviour and perceived workload, and by investigating different approaches to constructing such objects from diverse results. Overall, our experimental findings suggest that items which play a central role within composite objects are decisive in determining their usefulness, and that the overall properties of composite objects (i.e., relevance, diversity and coherence) play a combined role in mediating object usefulness

Characterizing Search Behavior in Productivity Software

Complex software applications expose hundreds of commands to users through intricate menu hierarchies. One of the most popular productivity software suites, Microsoft Office, has recently developed functionality that allows users to issue free-form text queries to a search system to quickly find commands they want to execute, retrieve help documentation or access web results in a unified interface. In this paper, we analyze millions of search sessions originating from within Microsoft Office applications, collected over one month of activity, in an effort to characterize search behavior in productivity software. Our research brings together previous efforts in analyzing command usage in large-scale applications and efforts in understanding search behavior in environments other than the web. Our findings show that users engage primarily in command search, and that re-accessing commands through search is a frequent behavior. Our work represents the first large-scale analysis of search over command spaces and is an important first step in understanding how search systems integrated with productivity software can be successfully developed

Exploring composite retrieval from the users' perspective

Aggregating results from heterogeneous sources and presenting them in a blended interface – aggregated search – has become standard practice for most commercial Web search engines. Composite retrieval is emerging as a new search paradigm, where users are presented with semantically aggregated information objects, called bundles, containing results originating from different verticals. In this paper we study composite retrieval from the user perspective. We conducted an exploratory user study where 40 participants were required to manually generate bundles that satisfy various information needs, using heterogeneous results retrieved by modern search engines. Our main objective was to analyse the contents and characteristics of user-generated bundles. Our results show that users generate bundles on common subtopics, centred around pivot documents, and that they favour bundles that are relevant, diverse and cohesive

Playing Your Cards Right: The Effect of Entity Cards on Search Behaviour and Workload

In addition to merging results of different types (e.g.~images, videos, news items) into a ranked list of Web documents, modern search engines have also started displaying entity cards (ECs) on the results page. Entity cards are intended to enhance search experience in several ways: (i) they help searchers navigate diversified results, (ii) provide a summary of relevant content directly on the results page and (iii) support exploratory search by highlighting relevant entities associated with a given user query. We conducted a large-scale crowd-sourced user study, with more than $700$ unique searchers, to investigate the effects of entity cards on search behaviour and perceived workload. We find that the presence of ECs has a strong effect on both the way users interact with search results and their perceived task workload. Furthermore, by manipulating EC properties content, coherence and vertical diversity), we uncover different effects and interactions between card properties on measures of search behaviour and workload. Our study contributes an in-depth analysis of the effects of entity cards on user interaction with modern Web search interfaces

Composite Retrieval of Heterogeneous Web Search

Traditional search systems generally present a ranked list of documents as answers to user queries. In aggregated search systems, results from different and increasingly diverse verticals (image, video, news, etc.) are returned to users. For instance, many such search engines return to users both images and web documents as answers to the query “flower”. Aggregated search has become a very popular paradigm. In this paper, we go one step further and study a different search paradigm: composite retrieval. Rather than returning and merging results from different verticals, as is the case with aggregated search, we propose to return to users a set of “bundles”, where a bundle is composed of “cohesive ” results from several verticals. For example, for the query “London Olympic", one bundle per sport could be returned, each containing results extracted from news, videos, images, or Wikipedia. Composite retrieval can promote exploratory search in a way that helps users understand the diversity of results available for a specific query and decide what to explore in more detail. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a variety of approaches to construct bundles that are relevant, cohesive and diverse. Compared with three baselines (traditional “general web only ” ranking, federated search ranking and aggregated search), our evaluation results demonstrate significant performance improvement for a highly heterogeneous web collection

Crafting Personal Information - Resistance, Imperfection, and Self-Creation in Bullet Journaling

Bullet journals are hand-written and self-created combinations of calendar, journal and planner. Central to this practice is how personal information is managed through a craft-based process. Based on a qualitative study, we discuss a set of themes that emerged in our analysis of this practice. We discuss how open-ended use of various materials for crafting of personal information engages in: 1) deliberate and strategic boundary work of what information to include and how combinations of data provide holistic and novel views of practitioner's life situations; 2) processes of self-creation and reflection on personal life trajectories; 3) appreciation of ourselves and the world around us as imperfect; and 4) ways of resisting the "business-like efficiency" that come with the large quantities of information that permeate contemporary life. We propose that this opens up new directions for thinking about how technologies of personal information may come into play in people's lives