Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm

By Ryen W. White, Resa A. Roth. Exploratory Search, 2009

913 citations recorded by the source corpus.

As information becomes more ubiquitous and the demands that searchers have on search systems grow, there is a need to support search behaviors beyond simple lookup. Information seeking is the process or activity of attempting to obtain information in both human and technological contexts. Exploratory search describes an information-seeking problem context that is open-ended, persistent, and multifaceted, and information-seeking processes that are opportunistic, iterative, and multitactical. Exploratory searchers aim to solve complex problems and develop enhanced mental capacities. Exploratory search systems support this through symbiotic human-machine relationships that provide guidance in exploring unfamiliar information landscapes. Exploratory search has gained prominence in recent years. There is an increased interest from the information retrieval, information science, and human-computer interaction communities in moving beyond the traditional turn-taking interaction model support d by major Web search engines, and toward support for human intelligence amplification and information use. In this lecture, we introduce exploratory search, relate it to relevant extant research, outline the features of exploratory search systems, discuss the evaluation of these systems, and suggest some future directions for supporting exploratory search. Exploratory search is a new frontier in the search domain and is becoming increasingly important in shaping our future world. Table of Contents: Introduction / Defining Exploratory Search / Related Work / Features of Exploratory Search Systems / Evaluation of Exploratory Search Systems / Future Directions and concluding Remarks

Subfields: Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/ac361f464ab1c0afa16d13c14218a9612316a579

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Citations in the corpus

To search or to ask: the routing of information needs between traditional search engines and social networks (2014, background): “The same is not true of exploratory queries, however, which are widely recognized as a weakness of modern search technology [34, 35].”
Voyager: Exploratory Analysis via Faceted Browsing of Visualization Recommendations (2016, neutral): “These considerations were informed by existing principles for visualization design [24], exploratory search [14, 43], and mixed-initiative systems [19], then refined through our experiences across multiple design iterations.”
From Small-World Networks to Comparison-Based Search (2011, background): “This problem is known to be strongly related to the small-world network design problem.”
Which academic search systems are suitable for systematic reviews or meta‐analyses? Evaluating retrieval qualities of Google Scholar, PubMed, and 26 other resources (2020, background): “The criticism of user-friendliness at any cost is especially directed at Google Scholar, which is more concerned with “ tuning ” its first results page (75, p15) than with overall precision.”
Linked open data to support content-based recommender systems (2012, background): “To this aim, the interlinked and structured nature of LOD datasets plays an important role since it eases the computation of a human-understandable explanation because it allows the user to explore [27] the results space following different dimensions (each one corresponding to an ontological proper”
A Survey of Model Architectures in Information Retrieval (2025, unknown): “The commonly used smoothing methods (Zhai and Lafferty, 2004; Zhai et al., 2008) include Jalinek-Mercer smoothing, Dirichlet smoothing, etc.”