| Web search has become one of the prominent information behaviors of the new millennium (Fallows, D., 2008). Web search refers not only to the process of entering keywords into a search engine site, but it also includes a related ecology of online information-seeking activities, such as browsing to specific URLs, making sense of found content, iteratively revising a query, and disseminating results. Web searches may be accomplished with a single query, or they may span multiple work sessions. For example, exploratory search tasks (White et al., 2006;White and Roth, 2009) can potentially last days, months, or even longer.
Traditionally, the tools that facilitate Web search have been designed for solitary use. Web search engines, for example, are designed for a single person to enter a few keywords related to what they are looking for, and then sift individually through a list of the results the search engine returns. More generally, when people search for information online, they typically useWeb search engines or other sites merely as starting-off points to orienteer to an information target (Teevan et al., 2004), but even such broader considerations of the use ofWeb browsers and link following for information seeking are primarily studied as and designed for the single user scenario. |
