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Amanda Spink: Amanda Spink is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science, University of North Texas, Denton, USA
Judy Bateman: Judy Bateman is Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science, Catholic University of America, Texas, USA
Bernard J. Jansen: Bernard J. Jansen is Executive Officer in the Department of Electrical Engineering, United States Military Academy, West Point, USA
ACKNOWLEDGMENT: The authors grateful acknowledge the assistance of Graham Spencer, Doug Cutting, Amy Smith and Catherine Yip of EXCITE, Inc. We also thank Mark Wilcox, Leslie Burkett and Nancy Spaid of UNT, and Tefko Saracevic of Rutgers University, and the anonymous reviewers for their contribution to the development of this research.
Introduction
The Web is a collection of information resources of all kinds. However, the selection, organization, and retrieval of Web materials are not standardized and wide variation exists in the access capabilities of Web search engines. Most Web search engines are similar to access mechanisms to digital libraries and information retrieval (IR) systems that use IR techniques (e.g. Boolean queries and relevance ranking). In the broadest sense, the Web search engines are a gateway to information services including digital libraries and IR. In many cases, users must search the Web to access digital libraries and IR systems - particularly if they do not know specific URLs for these services. Owing to the growing importance of Web searching and the need for more effective Web search services, a growing body of research is beginning to investigate users' interactions with Web search services (e.g. EXCITE). Behavior common to IR systems users can also be investigated with Web users. The aim of the study presented in this paper is to explore if behaviors exhibited by IR system users, i.e. successive or related searches concerning the same or evolving information problem, are also common to users of Web search engines.
Many IR researchers have modeled users' interactions with IR systems. Ingwersen (1992, 1996) took a broad approach and suggested cognitive representations by all participants in interaction, users, texts, intermediaries and systems, to serve as the base for a cognitive model of IR. Belkin et al. (1995) took a more specific approach and treated IR interactions as a series of episodes or frames, each of...