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Find what I mean: exploring new kinds of search results

Published: 20 October 2002 Publication History

Abstract

This paper discusses various scenarios encountered by visitors using search for a large documentation library. It identifies potential problems arising from the users' level of understanding of the documentation and the search system. It proposes solutions to these problems, some of which are common to other search systems, and others that may be specific to this type of documentation and audience.The paper then considers ways in which the documentation can be organized and written to make choices easier for searchers. It presents examples of popular destinations and typical navigation paths, illustrating how users sometimes find what they want, and other times find it difficult to make a choice or end up in the wrong place.In particular, it explores nontraditional techniques such as:
Guiding users to "jumping off" points, where they can perform searches using predefined terms and search options.
Identifying and recovering from specific search errors made by frequent users, as opposed to isolated, individual errors.
Rewording headings to persuade or dissuade searchers as appropriate. Some headings are made more emphatic, others are intentionally made more vague.
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References

[1]
Russell, John. Who Are You, and Where Did You Come From? IEEE Professional Communication Society, October 2001.
[2]
Andersen, Jakob. Microcontent: How to Write Headlines, Page Titles, and Subject Lines. Alertbox, September 1998. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980906.html

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  • (2004)Preferences of People with Disabilities to Improve Information Presentation and Information Retrieval Inside Internet Services – Results of a User StudyComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-540-27817-7_45(296-301)Online publication date: 2004

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cover image ACM Conferences
SIGDOC '02: Proceedings of the 20th annual international conference on Computer documentation
October 2002
272 pages
ISBN:1581135432
DOI:10.1145/584955
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 20 October 2002

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Author Tags

  1. books
  2. hierarchy
  3. navigation
  4. online information
  5. search
  6. web interfaces

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SIGDOC02
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SIGDOC02: 20th International Conference on Systems Documentations
October 20 - 23, 2002
Ontario, Toronto, Canada

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Overall Acceptance Rate 355 of 582 submissions, 61%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2004)Preferences of People with Disabilities to Improve Information Presentation and Information Retrieval Inside Internet Services – Results of a User StudyComputers Helping People with Special Needs10.1007/978-3-540-27817-7_45(296-301)Online publication date: 2004

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