How far will you go?: characterizing and predicting online search stopping behavior using information scent and need for cognition

Abstract

1. ABSTRACT Predicting when online searchers terminate search for information tasks without obvious end-points is a challenging task. Previous research concludes that people stop based on intuitions of enough [4], yet few studies have systematically examined online search stopping behavior. For open-ended search tasks, searchers often have to reformulate their queries in order to obtain a sufficient amount of information, which means that before searchers quit searching for a task entirely (stopping at the task level), they also stop result evaluation for different queries during the search (stopping at the query level).