Towards Understanding and Supporting Exploratory Searches

Exploratory search is an intuitive concept in interactive information retrieval. It is known that searchers use exploratory search strategies when learning and investigating a new domain. Many definitions for Exploratory Search have been proposed. However, the main dimensions involve high uncertainty with respect to the problem context, the user expertise, and the search process. In this work, we study exploratory search in the literature, and we provide a conceptual model of exploratory search. We also conduct a user study to examine how literature searches are exploratory and what factors influence the exploratory dimensions and characteristics. Moreover, we review the exploratory support tasks, and we try to better design and evaluate exploratory user interfaces.