Information-seeking behavior - exactly how do we find what (we think) we need to know?

The other night I did a search for my grandson's paper on Saturn's moon, Titan, which has been in the news recently. My son talked about how the boy needs to learn to use the library to find books on his subject. This was, of course, music to my little ex-librarian's ears. Kids DO need to learn to use both the library and the internet for information. But their first step will undoubtedly be a websearch. Will it give them the info they need? Maybe, maybe not...

A recent article in Scientific American, "Seeking Better Web Searches", talks about "Googling" as the information-seeking process of choice for most of us these days. The article describes several new search engines that make the common keyword search more precise, yielding fewer or more precise results.

Wanting to try it out, I did a search using "information-seeking behavior" (using the quotation marks to narrow the search to titles with exactly those words in that order) on Google, Yahoo, and several other seach engines. On Google, I got 25,900 hits - way too many to go through. One of the new search engines mentioned, Mooter, is supposed to display results in a cluster format, allowing the searcher to refine the search further. Mooter must have gotten too much publicity, because their site has been down since that article came out. Probably too many people "mooting".

The first few articles on Google included a bibliography, several papers by librarians and library-science students, and other scholarly works. Yahoo got me 23,700 of the same or similar results. Dogpile gave me the same as did several other search engines. Another search engine, Feedster, gave me some really irrelevant, but interesting results - like an employment ad for a "Director of Information Technology.

The articles I turned up in my search discussed how people look for information and gave links to other articles. In other words, they gave me some information and then showed me where to look for more information. This could go on forever.

Are we really searching for information or do we forage for it, as Stuart K.Card and Peter Pirolli suggested in "Information Foraging"

I think we trundle about with our noses to the 'information forest' floor, snatching up whatever catches our eye to hoard in our info-stash. The goodies we happen upon may or may not give us the answers we set out to find.

The articles hinted at, but did not really discuss one fact that librarians - especially public librarians - have known for years. That people rarely, if ever, come into a library knowing exactly what questions to ask to find the answers they need. People often come to the reference desk asking for books on "dog shows", when what they really want is a history of the American Kennel Club or Madison Square Garden or how to train their dogs to stop barking at the mailman. Reference librarians are trained to conduct a reference interview to cut through the extraneous ideas to get to the real issue. Some librarians are better at it than others, but most know that it is critical.

In a previous life, I spent my days either working the reference desk or training college students (and faculty) how to use a modern library. I also held classes in how to search the internet. The students learned to ask at least some of the right questions to get the information they needed.

Search engines don't do that. A search engine is, after all, merely an index of webpages. Its software searches the database and returns the results, sorted in order of relevance, amount paid for the listing or date. The webpages listed may or not answer our questions.

It's almost like you have to know the answers before you ask the questions!!

As Daniel Rose says in his article, "Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior
with Search User Interfaces for the Web", , "It is clear that there is a discrepancy between the rich and varied search behavior of users and the simplistic, one-size-fits-all approach of web search engines."

Let's hope search engine companies hire enough experienced librarians to create more "human" ways for us all to search.