"Other Times It's Just Strolling Back Through My Timeline": Investigating Re-finding Behaviour on Twitter and Its Motivations

Returning to previously viewed or possessed information - re-finding - is a core information seeking behaviour that has been studied in diverse contexts including physical environments, personal computer filing systems, web search and email. Despite being designed for real-time and ephemeral content, recent studies have shown that re-finding of older content is performed in social media applications too. To better understand why this is and how re-finding can be better supported, in this work we describe the results of a large-scale web-based survey which queried 606 Twitter users on how and how often they re-find, as well as the motivations for this behaviour. Our main contribution is the qualitative analysis of these motivations and motivations sourced via two existing studies, resulting in a coding scheme documenting the breadth and frequency of different social media re-finding tasks. We discuss how this classification can be used in (i) the design of task-based evaluations, (ii) the detection and interpretation of re-finding in click-stream data and (iii) the design of social media search systems.