Search transition as a measure of effort in information retrieval interaction

摘要

In this article we introduce the concept of search transitionsas a unit for measuring the effort invested by searchers ininformation retrieval interaction. The concept is discussedand compared to traditional measures of effort, such astime. To investigate the usability of the search transitionmeasure we have performed an analysis of 149 logs in anIR system indexing a collection of 650.000 Wikipediaarticles. Our findings show that search transitions correlatewith other, more mechanistic, effort measures. Additionalexperiments are necessary to investigate if it is a bettermeasure of effort than e.g. number of documentsexamined.