Information Gathering Tasks on the Web: Attempting to Identify the User Search Behaviour

This paper presents a part of a larger research study that concerned investigating the task of information gathering on the Web. The study took several subtasks of the information gathering task for investigations in order to develop recommendations for improving the design of tools intended for this type of task. Since information gathering is a highly search-reliant task, it was important to investigate the kind of search behavior users follow during the task. The research discussed in this paper attempts to identify the user search behaviour during information gathering on the Web. The results of the user study indicate that the user search behaviour during Web information gathering tasks has characteristics of both orienteering and teleporting behaviours.