Uncovering Task Based Behavioral Heterogeneities in Online Search Behavior

While a major share of prior work have considered search sessions as the focal unit of analysis for seeking behavioral insights, search tasks are emerging as a competing perspective in this space. In the current work, we quantify user search task behavior for both single- as well as multi-task search sessions and relate it to tasks and topics. Specifically, we analyze user-disposition, topic and user-interest level heterogeneities that are prevalent in search task behavior. Our results show that while search multi-tasking is a common phenomenon among the search engine users, the extent and choice of multi-tasking topics vary significantly across users. We find that not only do users have varying propensities to multi-task, they also search for distinct topics across single-task and multi-task sessions. To our knowledge, this is among the first studies to fully characterize online search tasks with a focus on user- and topic-level differences that are observable from search sessions.