Categorising search sessions: some insights from human judgments

The session is a common unit of interaction that is used in search log analysis. By analysing sessions, it is possible to identify distinct classes of searcher behaviour that can be used to design search applications that better support groups of users based on their expected behaviours. This paper describes an online card sort experiment to investigate how people distinguish between search sessions (i.e., how they group them) to gain insights into their organising principles and to inform the future use of automated approaches, such as clustering. Results show patterns of user behaviour to be the most common way of grouping sessions.

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