Bennett Ponsford wrote:
> Subject headings keyword - 40.31% resulted in no hits Journal title
> keyword - 37.41% resulted in no hits Expert keyword - 31.98% Title
> keyword - 31.51% Journal title starts with - 28.42% Title starts with
> - 25.26% Author keyword - 25.12% Keyword - 20.53%
It seems obvious but also interesting that Keyword is the least likely
to get you zero hits. That could well lead to a certain "user
satisfaction" with that type of search.
>
> One question is then, what do people do when their search results in
> no hits? From just browsing through the logs, I can say that some
> people just keep retrying until they find something they like, but I
> don't have numbers on that yet. Nor do I have numbers on how many
> people just give up and move on.
Mike Berger studied this in the MELVYL logs for his doctoral
dissertation. He was able to identify "sessions" and to see how people
compensated for zero results. Unfortunately, he never wrote up anything
other than his dissertation, which is:
Author Berger, Michael George.
Title Information-seeking in the online bibliographic system : an
exploratory study / by Michael George Berger.
Publisher 1994.
Description v, 216 leaves ; 28 cm.
Note Thesis (Ph. D. in Library and Information Studies)--University
of California, Berkeley, May 1994.
As I recall from conversations with him, users turned out to be quite
resilient, trying lots of different angles before succeeding or giving
up (from the logs you couldn't really tell, but most users moved from
zero results to non-zero results). His figures also showed that the
number of initial zero results was surprisingly high. I know when I
tried to discuss the pitfalls of keyword searching with a class of
computer science students at Stanford some years ago, their response was
(in reference to search engines): "But I always get something." In the
general equation of something v. nothing, something does tend to be a
happier result, if even wrong.
--
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Karen Coyle / Digital Library Consultant
kcoyle@kcoyle.net http://www.kcoyle.net
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Received on Thu Feb 07 2008 - 19:53:40 EST