Models of Information Seeking: The Standard Model vs. The Tetris Model

The standard model of information seeking, developed through observation, is one that outlines the basic actions involved in finding information. Variations of the standard information seeking model has been developed through work by Salton and Ennis, Shneiderman, and Broder, among others. The most developed model from Marchionini and White describes the information seeking process as:

Recognizing a need for information
Accepting the challenge to take action to fulfill the need
Formulating the problem
Expressing the information need in a search system
Examination of the results
Reformulation of the problem and its expression, and
Use of the results

(Marchionini and White in [...]

Search User Interfaces

If you’re interested in the academic side of search, chances are you’ve come across the work of Marti Heart, a professor at Berkeley’s School of Information. Her work covers everything from search engines, search interfaces, social technology, information visualization and web usability. Her book, Search User Interfaces, came out late last year and is a great resource for anyone interested in the information seeking process and how users interact with search and search results. Better yet, the text of the entire book is available free online.
If you are interested in usability, the chapters on the design, presentation, and evaluation of search [...]

Google News Sitemaps

You’ve all seen Google news results when searching online. But did you know those results come from, in part, user submitted XML sitemaps? Google allows you to submit XML sitemaps to its news feed in the same way you can submit an XML sitemap of your website to Google Webmaster Tools. The sitemap works in the same way for both: it allows Google to discover your pages and index them faster and more accurately. The sitemaps also allow you to use metadata to better describe the pages for indexing.
Google is currently in a six month transition making changes to the way [...]

How Buyersphere Insights Impact Your Content Development Strategy

Enquiro has an active research department that tackles everything from eye tracking studies to website user behaviour. One of their recent projects has been to tackle the problem of how business buys from business, which has been compiled into a book called The Buyersphere Project. B2B sales are notoriously challenging as you are not dealing with just one person but with all the complexities of an entire organization. Within an organization you find different people playing different roles and who have differing informational needs – which can be met at least in part by your website. When creating content for [...]

Google Busy Changing the World Again… or at least their Results Pages

To say Google has been busy would be an understatement – there’s been over 30 new search innovations since October. Keeping itself on pace, today Google announced the launch of real-time search, an innovation we know has been coming for a while now as Google tries to compete with the freshness of Twitter content. The new real-time search function, called “latest results”, incorporates feeds from news, blogs, FriendFeed, Twitter, Facebook, and Myspace. It shows up in the Google search results page similarly to how news, blog, images or video results are currently displayed. Here’s a screenshot:

The latest results scroll along [...]