A comparison of how users search on web finding and re-finding tasks

This study is to investigate how users search for web information for the first time (information finding) and locate previously found results on a subsequent effort (information re-finding). It constructs a two-staged experiment and employs various methods to compare users' search performance on different types of search tasks. The preliminary results show that participants in the study produced more interactions with search tools in the re-finding stage. Though the participants spent less time in the re-finding than that in the finding stage, the difference was not significant. It is worth noting that in some cases the search performance of re-finding was even lower than that of finding. This reveals that re-finding may not work effectively for all search tasks. Further research is needed to investigate on what circumstances users had better initiate new searches rather than repeat previous searches in the re-finding stage.