Ph.D. Program News

April 27, 2009

Finding good information on the Web couldn’t be simpler right? Just enter your search terms and hit the “Enter” key.

Think again. In 2008, the number of unique URLs topped 1 trillion. Several billion pages are added each day. And many people aren’t finding the best information possible. How do people go about finding what they need, trawling through such an unfathomable mass of information?

That’s what Nina Wacholder (top) and Catherine L. Smith (bottom) want to know – and they want to understand better the behavior and thoughts of information seekers.

Wacholder, a linguist and an associate professor of library and information science, and Ph.D. candidate Smith have received a prestigious Google Research Award. The $70,000 grant will help researchers understand why people using search engines often fail to use suggested search terms, and how the way search results are presented might have an impact.

“This is part of a larger endeavor to try to understand from people’s outside behavior what is going on in their heads when they are using search engines and looking for information,” Wacholder said. “The goal is to understand how people process information and to figure out how to develop search engines that meet user needs.”

The grant will fund studies that use cognitive and psycholinguistic techniques that measure how people make “lexical decisions” – how they recognize words that are semantically related to each other, like “robin,” “nest,” and “egg.” Wacholder and Smith also plan to use eye-tracking technology to learn more about how people look at suggested terms, recording how they scan computer monitors and where their eyes fixate.

The research will lead to better search systems. “There has been some evidence that people, even when query terms are suggested, do not necessarily recognize them or use them,” Wacholder said. Smith added: “We want to understand how to present useful terms in a way that makes their value obvious to a searcher.”