The role of domain knowledge in document selection from search results

It is a frequently seen scenario that when people are not familiar with their search topics, they use a simple keyword search, which leads to a large amount of search results in multiple pages. This makes it difficult for users to pick relevant documents, especially given that they are not knowledgeable of the topics. To explore how systems can better help users find relevant documents from search results, the current research analyzed document selection behaviors of users with different levels of domain knowledge (DK). Data were collected in a laboratory study with 35 participants each searching on four tasks in the genomics domain. The results show that users with high and low DK levels selected different sets of documents to view; those high in DK read more documents and gave higher relevance ratings for the viewed documents than those low in DK did. Users with low DK tended to select documents ranking toward the top of the search result lists, and those with high in DK tended to also select documents ranking down the search result lists. The findings help design search systems that can personalize search results to users with different levels of DK.