Tags: Exploratory Search, Information Needs, Casual Search, Leisure

In trying to understand Exploratory Search, the community has focused on users who are working towards an information need, but who are unclear of their goal, technology, or domain of information. Our recent research, however, suggests that this de nition misses perhaps the most exploratory search scenario of all - scenarios where the goal is not information-oriented. We present combined evidence from two on-going research projects, which demonstrates that such situations occur regularly within casual-leisure situations. We use our fi ndings to characterise such tasks and suggest that casual-leisure search scenarios deserve more focus as we work towards supporting exploratory search.

Casual-leisure Searching - the Exploratory Search scenarios that break our current models.pdf