The Impacts of Time Constraint on Users’ Search Strategy
during Search Process
Chang Liu
Peking University
5 Yiheyuan Road
Haidian Dist. Beijing, China
imliuc@pku.edu.cn
ABSTRACT
This study examined the effects of time constraints on
searchers’ information search strategies during search
process, particularly at two search stages (first round and
end point). A user experiment with forty participants was
conducted, and each participant was asked to search with
and without time constraint. The results showed that time
constraint had significant effect on users’ first/mean dwell
time on search engine result pages (SERPs) during the first
query interval; however, time constraint did not influence
their dwell time on SERPs or content pages when the whole
session was considered, and it only had significant effect on
the number of pages viewed per query. The findings
indicated that users did employ different search strategies
when searching with and without time constraint, and their
search strategies changed over time within the search
session. Generally, when there was no time constraint, users
tended to employ economic-style search strategy at the
beginning of search; but when given time constraint, they
became more selective and cautious in examining the
search results. The findings of this study have implications
for search system design to assist searchers under time
constraint and help them search more effectively and
efficiently.
Keywords
Time constraint, search strategy, search stages.
INTRODUCTION
Context is an important factor found to influence users’
information seeking and search behavior. Several
contextual factors including task type, users’ domain
knowledge, search skills, cognitive styles and etc., have
been intensively examined. Savolainen [23] reviewed the
ASIST 2016, October 14-18, 2016, Copenhagen, Denmark.
[Author Retains Copyright.]
Yiming Wei
Peking University
5 Yiheyuan Road
Haidian Dist. Beijing, China
weiyiming@pku.edu.cn
research on time as a context in information seeking
behavior, and suggested that temporal factors of
information seeking can be approached from the angle of
constraints for users. As is often the case, time constraint is
a contextual factor that commonly existed in our daily life:
like having a deadline to complete a daily task, or searchers
may expect the search system to respond to their search
tasks in a short time and wish to accomplish search tasks
within a given time. Recently, several studies had reported
the effects of time constraint or time pressure upon search
behaviors and search experience (e.g., [8][9][10][17][18]).
According to them, time constraint and time pressure could
bring acceleration in information processing, as well as
affected searchers’ assessments of search experience, i.e.
pre-search confidence, search performance and satisfaction,
and search difficulties.
Till now, it is still not clear whether searchers would
change their search strategies when given time constraint;
and if so, how would they change search strategies. In this
study, we conducted a user experiment, controlled the time
available for participants to search for the task, and then
examined two kinds of interactions to evaluate their search
strategies: page-related behavioral measures and time-
related behavioral measures, to address this research
problem.
Besides, in many information-seeking models [3][20], time
has been modeled as the duration of a search process within
which users’ information needs and behaviors varied.
However, we know little about how exactly users may
adjust their behaviors and strategies over time during the
web searching. Jiang, et al.[19] suggested that when users
were in longer search session solving complex tasks, their
browsing and clicking patterns on SERPs (search engine
result pages) changed over time.
In this study, we are particular interested to see whether
time constraint would have different effect on users’ search
strategies in different search stages: specifically, the first
query interval and the whole search session. Thus, we also
compared their search interactions in the two search stages
under different time conditions to evaluate their search
strategies.
RELATED WORK
Time as a search context
In the literature of decision making, researchers have found
that when consumers experience time pressure, there are
generally three kinds of adaptation strategies in people’s
attempts to cope with it: 1) acceleration, 2) selection of
information, and 3) alteration of information search pattern
(see [30] for the review). Weenig & Maarleveld
investigated the impact of time constraint on information
search strategies for complex choice tasks. In their study,
they found that participants did not adapt to time constraint
through acceleration, but rather took more time on each
item[30]. In our study, we are also interested to see if users
would accelerate or decelerate dwell time on each of the
webpages when given time constraint.
In information behavior research, Slone [25] examined the
influence of time constraint on general Internet and Web
search goals and search behavior; particularly what
searchers would search with and without time constraint.
Crescenzi, Capra & Arguello [8] collected the participants’
self-reported time pressure during search using crowd-
sourced user study to test the influence of time pressure on
users’ search process. Users’ perceived time pressure and
task difficulty were found to be predictors of users’
satisfaction with their search strategies. Specifically,
perceived time pressure can negatively impact users’
satisfaction.
Research by [17] and [18] reported the results of pre- and
post-search questionnaire data regarding users’ search
experience with and without time constraint. It was found
that time constraint did not affect searchers’ assessment of
task difficulty, but reduced searchers’ pre-search
confidence, evaluation of search performance, knowledge
acquisition, affective states after searching, and anticipation
of needed time significantly. But they did not examine the
effect of time constraint on users’ search strategies,
especially the search interactions on webpages.
Recently, several studies have examined the effects of time
constraints together with other types of search constraints,
e.g.[9], [10],[14]. Crescenzi, Kelly and Azzopardi ([9],[10])
investigated the impact of time pressure and system delays
on search behavior from a user experiment. Results of [9]
showed that participants in the time pressure condition
issued queries significantly more frequently, viewed fewer
documents per query and spent less time examining
documents and SERPs. Results of [10] reported that
participants who experienced time constraint experienced
higher task difficulty, was less satisfied with their
performance and engaged in more metacognitive
monitoring. Fujikawa, Joho & Nakayama [14] explicitly
studied the effects of search constraints on people’s
perception, search behavior, and search performance. The
constraints they examined were Query (number of queries
one can submit) and View (number of documents one can
view). As a baseline condition, participants were required to
accomplish each search task within 15 minutes, and this
time constraint was required across all three conditions.
Their results demonstrated that both query constraint and
viewing constraint significantly increased the level of
participants’ attention to query formulation and search
result browsing. They did not examine the effect of time
constraint, but their results revealed that certain constraints
in search would be beneficial for searchers.
Search strategies
Search strategies and search tactics have been research
subjects in information search behavior research. Bates [3]
suggested that users’ search behavior can be characterized
by search strategies, and search strategies are made up of
sequences of search tactics. While search tactics focus on
each move or action during search, search strategies deal
with the overall planning of the search, and are the
sequences of tactics that help achieve sub goals of the user's
main search goal.
Researchers have showed that individual characteristics and
contextual factors could influence users’ search strategies.
Ford, Wood, and Walsh [12] showed that a variety of
individual differences including cognitive styles, search
experience, and gender influenced users’ search strategies
on their query styles. Heinström [16] discovered three
typical information seeking styles: broad scanning,
explorative searching and precise searching, which could be
depicted along a dimension of exploration to specificity;
and showed that students’ personality traits have significant
influence on their seeking styles, and search contexts, e.g.
time limit, might influence their choices of seeking styles.
Other factors like domain knowledge, search experience
and task types have also been found to influence search
strategies (e.g., [6],[26]).
Recently, through adopting eye-tracking data, research on
users’ search strategies in evaluating SERPs has also
received much attention. Alua, Maiaranta and Räihä [1]
conducted a semi-controlled studied in which allowed
participants first saw a pre-defined search result page and
make their own choice to modify the query, enter an URL
or select a result from the pre-defined page. They divided
users’ SERPs’ evaluation styles into two categories,
economic and exhaustive strategies, based on their speed in
deciding to take a next action. Exhaustive searchers looked
at more than half of the visible search results on SERPs for
more than half of the tasks; and economic searchers would
briefly browse SERPs and make their decision about query
reformulation or following a link faster. Dumais, Buscher
and Cutrell [11] investigated both the distribution of
searchers’ attention across SERPs and individuals’ distinct
patterns of attention. They recorded users’ gaze movements,
conducted cluster analysis and identified three general
groups of searchers according to their detailed attention
distribution: Exhaustive searcher (users who explored the
SERP broadly), Economic-Result searchers (those who
explored narrowly but looked at some additional results),
and Economic-Ads (the remaining who explored narrowly
and looked regularly at ads). In a more recent study,
Buscher, White, Dumais & Huang [6] further examined
searchers’ cursor movements and time on SERPs together
with eye gaze data, and confirmed the existence of different
examination strategies in a naturalistic search setting and
specified the patterns of the three strategies: Economic
strategy, Exhaustive-Active strategy and Exhaustive-
Passive strategy.
Most of these studies on SERP examination strategies have
been focusing on individual differences, little is known
about how users would change their search strategies under
time constraint. It is possible that when users were
searching with time constraint, they would like to change
their search strategies to search more efficiently. In this
study, we will examine how users would change their
search strategies to cope with time limit in searching.
Search behavior at different search stages
Search stage is another important contextual factor
affecting users’ search behaviors. It has been suggested that
to accomplish a complex task, users usually go through
several stages within a search session ([19],[20]) and
searcher’s feelings, thoughts, and actions vary along the
different stages. Vakkari and colleagues ([28],[29]) found
that users’ querying behavior changed through out the
search session. In detail, they tended to use only a fraction
of the search terms to form queries at the very beginning,
while introduce more synonyms and parallel terms in latter
stages. Also, they would specify the terms for query
reformulation during the search process. White, Ruthven &
Jose [31] suggested that the use of IRF (implicit relevance
feedback) and ERF (explicit relevance feedback) also
differs in different task stages, where IRF is used more in
the middle of the search, while ERF in the end. Jiang, He
and Allan [19] examined the changes of users’ browsing
and clicking patterns during a search session. They found
that as a session progressed, on the one hand, users would
shift their attention to less focus on top 2 results but more
on lower-ranked ones; on the other hand, they became less
interested in results as they had fewer unique clicks,
fixations and viewed less SERPs per query. It seems users’
search strategy changed over time within a search session.
According to Liu & Belkin[22], task stage could help in
interpreting document usefulness from the first dwell time
on documents. In research that generated prediction models
of task difficulty based on users’ search interactions at
different stages (first round, middle point, and end point),
the findings demonstrated that the first query round of a
search have outperformed other stages in both prediction
performance and prediction efficiency ([21]). Previous
studies have showed that users may change their search
strategies as search processes. In the current research, we
will also examine users’ interaction at different stages to
explore whether users’ change their search strategies to
cope with time constraint.
METHOD
A lab-based user experiment was conducted to investigate
the effects of time constraint on users’ search interactions.
Forty undergraduate students (20 females and 20 males)
from a comprehensive university were recruited in this
experiment. There were 5 freshmen, 11 sophomores, 15
juniors and 9 seniors.
Time Constraint
In this study, time constraint is the main independent
variable, and was set by assigning two conditions for
participants to search for tasks through the Internet: with
time constraint (TC) and without time constraint (NTC). In
TC conditions, time available for participants to finish a
search task was restricted to 5 minutes. This limit was
determined according to prior studies in psychology
(e.g.[27],[30]). In our experiment, we set the time constraint
to less than 50% of the average time in our pilot studies, i.e.
5 minutes, for the purpose of generating severe time
pressure. In TC conditions, participants were informed that
they only have 5 minutes to accomplish the task before they
started searching. In NTC conditions, participants were told
beforehand that they could stop searching whenever they
thought enough information had been collected for the task
in their notebook file. Each participant conducted searching
under both conditions: two search tasks (one FF and one IU,
explained in section 3.2) in TC conditions and another two
search tasks (one FF and one IU) in NTC conditions. To
eliminate the possible carryover effect given the within-
subject design of time constraint, participants were given
five minutes to take a break after they completed two search
tasks in one time condition and before they switched to the
other time condition. The order of search tasks and time
conditions was systematically balanced using 2x2 Graeco-
Latin Square design.
Search Tasks
In this study, we constructed two types of search tasks
according to the first two cognitive process dimensions of
Anderson and Krathwohl’s Taxonomy of Learning [2]: Fact
Finding (remember: Retrieving, recognizing, and recalling
relevant knowledge from long-term memory) and
Information Understanding (constructing meaning from
oral, written, and graphic messages through interpreting,
exemplifying, classifying, summarizing, inferring,
comparing, and explaining). Each type of tasks consists of
two tasks with different topics, and each task was
constructed in a simulated work task situation following
Borlund’s guidelines [5]. Task descriptions in this
experiment are shown below:
Fact Finding 1: You heard that India has very interesting
wedding traditions, and now you want to search for the
following aspects of Indian Wedding: Wedding dresses,
painted hands, and the type of food served.
Fact Finding 2: One of your friends said he was bitten by a
rove Beetle, and felt very itching, and the wound festered
after scratching. You were quite worried about this type of
beetles. You want to search what is rove beetle? Is it
poisonous? What should you do if you see a rove beetle? If
bitten by a rove beetle, how should we treat?
Information Understanding 1 1: Your nephew is considering
trying out for a football team. Most of your relatives are
supportive of the idea, but you think this sport is dangerous
and are worried about the potential health risks.
Specifically, what are long-term health risks faced by teen
football players?
Information Understanding 2: Doric column is a distinctive
architectural form in Ancient Greece architecture. Please
search information about the general characteristics and
representative works of Doric column, and whether Doric
column has any influence on Chinese architecture? If so,
what are the representatives?
Procedure
Each user was invited to our interactive lab, to search for
four assigned search tasks through a desktop computer.
They first filled out a background questionnaire and were
then given a training task to warm up. During search,
participants were asked to respond to each task by typing or
copying/pasting useful information for the task into a
notebook file. After reading the task description and before
searching for each of the tasks, they filled out a pre-search
questionnaire about their topic familiarity and expected task
difficulty; after finishing the task (or they used up the time
given in TC conditions), they were then given a post-search
questionnaire to evaluate their own search performance. At
the end (after having finished four tasks), an exit
questionnaire was assigned to them to assess their overall
search experience. We used Morae Recorder 2 to record
searchers’ interactions on the computer and the computer
screen unobtrusively.
Behavioral Measures
The following two groups of behavioral measures were
calculated and examined from the search log recorded by
Morae Recorder in this study:
1) Page-related measures: number of content pages/SERPs,
number of unique content pages/SERPs, number of content
pages per query.
2) Time-related measures: first dwell time on unique
content pages/query SERPs, mean dwell time on content
pages/SERPs, total dwell time on content pages/ SERPs per
query, etc.
The above mentioned content pages refer to webpages
containing detailed contents, which users clicked to open
from links on SERPs or other content pages. Unique
1
This is a search task that has been used in Wu, Kelly, Edwards and
Arguello, 2012.
2
Morae Recorder, https://www.techsmith.com/
content pages are identified by their URLs, as they are
unique to each webpage. A query SERP is a SERP that
opened right after a query is issued, which only refers to the
first time a SERP was visited after users issuing a query;
while SERP refers to all the other SERPs that the user
visited except Query SERP.
Two Search Stages
Based on previous studies (e.g. [19], [22]), searchers’
behaviors in the initial query showed different features
compared with those in subsequent stages. To verify
whether their search strategies changed from the very
beginning of the session to the end of the session, we
calculated and compared users’ searching behavioral
measures at two search stages in our research: the first
query interval and the end of a whole session. The detailed
descriptions are as follow:
1) First query interval: refers to the duration from the start
of a task session to the time when user issues the second
query.
2) Whole session: refers to the time span from the start of a
task session to the end of it.
RESULTS
The distribution of each behavioral variable was not normal,
so Mann-Whitney U tests were conducted to compare these
variables between NTC and TC conditions at two different
time points during each search session. Results are shown
in Table 1.
First Query Interval
When only the first query interval was considered,
participants with and without time constraints behaved
rather similar; only two behavioral variables showed
significant difference: the first dwell time on query SERPs
and mean dwell time on SERPs. Users who experienced
time constraints had significantly longer first dwell time on
query SERPs (12.65s vs 6.87s). This measure, first dwell
time on Query SERPs, means the time in making the first
decision on the Query SERP, to either click a link or simply
leave the Query SERP to reformulate the query. The results
demonstrated that participants had longer decision time on
Query SERP in TC than in NTC. In addition, participants
had significant longer mean dwell time on SERPs in TC
than in NTC (12.14s vs 8.70s). The number of SERPs and
unique SERPs they viewed during this time period, on the
contrary, had no significant difference.
While participants with task time constraint also tended to
spent longer time on making their first decision to leave
unique content pages (23.51s vs 17.49s) and having longer
dwell time on valid content pages (22.62s vs 16.54s), the
differences were not significant. The number of content
pages and unique content pages they viewed during the first
query interval also varied insignificantly in TC and NTC.
 Table 1 The effects of time constraint on searchers' behavior at two points of search stage.
First-round Endpoint
NTC TC NTC TC
Mean Std. Mean Std. sig Mean Std. Mean Std. sig
Number of content pages per query 4.52 5.80 2.41 3.52 0.124 5.14 4.37 2.93 2.43 0.016
Number of unique content pages per query 2.93 3.44 1.76 2.03 0.263 3.02 2.62 1.83 1.28 0.033
Number of SERPs per query 2.90 2.14 2.55 2.25 0.348 3.15 1.56 2.56 1.47 0.028
Number of unique SERPs per query 1.10 0.41 1.03 0.19 0.543 1.21 0.37 1.12 0.36 0.037
First dwell time on unique content pages 17.49 12.80 23.51 21.76 0.418 15.21 5.78 15.99 14.26 0.397

First dwell time on Query SERPs (sec) 6.87 5.83 12.65 10.06 0.009 10.14 5.07 10.64 6.46 0.919

Mean dwell time on content pages (sec) 16.54 11.83 22.62 22.04 0.459 13.65 4.44 14.89 14.37 0.150

Mean dwell time on SERPs (sec) 8.70 5.37 12.14 7.31 0.042 10.27 4.38 10.19 3.82 0.834

Total dwell time on content pages per query (sec) 58.02 61.98 41.21 53.19 0.290 62.58 66.78 36.44 46.23 0.005

Total dwell time on SERPs per query (sec) 22.73 15.35 25.89 16.78 0.410 30.03 13.44 23.52 10.24 0.036

Ratio of dwell time on content pages 0.44 0.32 0.39 0.30 0.411 0.56 0.14 0.45 0.19 0.020

Ratio of dwell time on SERPs 0.36 0.28 0.38 0.23 0.323 0.36 0.15 0.42 0.18 0.222

Average query interval time (sec) 94.04 78.01 87.13 68.19 0.895 99.29 78.12 72.3 60.42 0.012

Average session time (sec) N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 632.09 421.85 218.46 71.8 0.000

Number of queries per session N/A N/A N/A N/A N/A 7.52 4.77 4.07 2.02 0.006

Participants had roughly the same query interval, total
dwell time on SERPs, and total dwell time on content pages
at this time point. No significant effect has been found of
time constraint on the ratio of total dwell time on SERPs to
query interval, nor the ratio of total dwell time on content
pages to query interval.
Whole Session
As showed in Table 1, thirteen of the eighteen measures
had significant differences between users with different
time conditions when the behavioral measures were
calculated after the whole session completed. Participants
searched with time constraint generated significantly fewer
queries (4.07 vs 7.52) for each task than their counterparts
experienced no time limit. As for each query, they also
viewed significantly fewer content pages (2.93 vs 5.14),
fewer unique content pages (1.83 vs 3.02), fewer SERPs
(2.56 vs 3.15), and fewer unique SERPs (1.12 vs 1.21).
With respect to time-related measures, there was no
difference in first dwell time on unique content pages or
mean dwell time on content pages. Moreover, the once
existed differences of their first dwell time on query SERPs
and mean dwell time on valid SERPs during the first query
interval were no longer significant at the end point.
However, after changing queries for several times and
when they finished a complete task session, users with time
constraint had significant shorter query interval time on
average (72.3s vs 99.29s) and spent rather shorter time on
both content pages (36.44s vs 62.58s) and SERPs (23.53s
vs 30.03s) per query than those with no such constraint.
Aside from this, while users in TC also spent significant
smaller proportion of their total dwell time on content
pages than in NTC (56% vs 45%), there was no significant
difference in the proportion of dwell time on SERPs (42%
vs 36%). It can be inferred that users’ dwelling strategies
changed over a task session.
DISCUSSIONS
We examined the effect of time constraint on users’ search
interactions at two time-stages during search episode in this
study: the first query interval (after searchers issued the
first query before they issued the second query) and the end
point when users have completed the whole task session.
Comparison of search strategy in the first query
interval
Our results demonstrated that time constraint did not have
significant effect on most of the behavioral measures in the
first query interval. Particularly, under the two time
conditions, users’ first query interval time was similar, and
the number of content pages and SERPs they viewed
during this time period were fairly similar. Considering the
number of content pages and SERPs were in a relatively
low level (unique content pages: 2.93 vs. 1.76; unique
SERPs: 1.10 vs. 1.03), it is reasonable for us to conjecture
that searchers took their first queries as the first trials of the
search system no matter with or without time constraint. It
seems that searchers only explore the search results of their
first queries briefly and would then quickly reformulate
their queries.
Besides the common pattern, participants with and without
time constraint had significantly different first dwell time
on query SERP in their first query interval. When there was
a time constraint, searchers had significant longer first
dwell time on query SERP; that means it took them longer
time in viewing the search result page and made their first
decision to leave it. Also, searchers spent longer dwell
time on SERPs on average when there was time constraint.
It was very likely that users who experienced a time
constraint were more selectively and cautiously in viewing
SERPs and deciding whether to select certain content pages
to view or try another query. For the dwell time on content
pages, although no significant difference was found, similar
to dwell time on SERPs, searchers with time constraint still
tended to spent longer time in reading each content page on
average and in making their first decision to leave each
unique content page.
In general, when there was no time limit, users’ search
strategy in the first query interval were likely to be served
as search trials to get familiar with the search systems and
related information in the data collection; however, users
who experienced a time constraint behaved more
selectively in choosing content pages they viewed and read
each content page a bit more carefully. The results also
demonstrated that searchers read search result lists for
longer time and then select only one or two content pages
to read when there was time constraint; while for those
without time limit, they were more relax and were not as
selective as their counterparts and they tended to make
quick decisions on which content pages to view on the first
search result page. This is a hypothetical explanation for
searchers’ interactions. Future research would examine
search logs in details to understand content of the pages
that users viewed in different time conditions, or to make
use of other equipment, e.g. eye tracker to compare the
reading patterns between two time conditions.
Comparison of search strategies during the whole
session
We also examined users’ behavioral measures at the end of
the search session to describe their general search strategies
during the whole session. In general, for the whole search
session, no significant difference has been found of time
constraint on the average dwell time of either content pages
or SERPs with or without time constraint, but users did
view significant fewer content pages and SERPs for each
query when there was time constraint. Such results indicate
that when given time constraint, searchers did not speed up
their reading process on either content pages or SERPs;
instead, they just reduced the number of content pages and
SERPs to read. The result also demonstrated that searchers
were relatively more selective in TC conditions.
This result is inconsistent with Crescenzi [9], where they
found participants who were given task time limits spent
significant less time on both SERPs and documents. But
they did not explain how the two variables were defined
and calculated, so it is not clear whether the results from
the two studies are comparable. Another difference is that
our experiment required participants to record their answers
in a notebook during the search episode, so participants
may have to read content pages more carefully, and then
cast an influence on their dwell time on content pages.
Another interesting pattern is that searchers had a
significantly smaller percentage of time spent on content
pages when given time constraint, but they had similar
percentage of time spent on SERPs. Therefore, we could
infer that searchers had relatively more percentage of time
spent on the search homepage. Since in our log, the dwell
time on search homepages was the duration of time from
the search homepage was fully loaded till the time when the
SERP for that query was shown, the longer dwell time on
search homepage indicated longer time in formulating
queries. It seems that when given time constraint, searchers
were more cautious or stressed in formulating queries, and
they might expect to formulate a query that could lead them
to good search results directly. Another possibility is that
they were more likely to make typos when there was a time
constraint, which delayed their time on the search
homepages. Future research on mouse clicks and
keystrokes is needed to better understand such phenomenon.
Comparisons between the two time stages
We are also interested to see how searchers changed their
search strategies from the beginning to the end of the
search session. The comparisons showed that when there
was time constraint, searchers reduced their first/mean
dwell time on both content pages and SERPs from the first
query interval to the end of the search session (showed in
left side of Figure1). When there was no time limit,
searchers also reduced their first/mean dwell time on
content pages, but they increased their first/mean dwell
time on SERPs from the first query interval to the end
(shown in right side of Figure 1).
 Figure 1 Comparisons of dwell-related measures in TC and NTC at two time stages
In general, as the search processed, users became more
familiar with the search topic, which allowed them to make
a faster decision on the usefulness of the content, and they
tended to accelerate their reading process within the search
session. This is a consistent pattern no matter whether there
was a time limit or not. However, when it comes to SERPs,
time limit had different effects on searchers interactions.
When searching without time limit, users increased their
first and mean dwell time on SERPs from the first query
interval to the end of the search session; however, when
searching with time limit, users slightly reduced their first
and mean dwell time on SERPs. On average, when the
whole session was considered, searchers with and without
time constraint had similar dwell time on SERPs. Such
results indicate that time constraint had more influence on
users’ dwell time on SERPs during the first query
interval—users were more cautious and selective on the
SERPs for the first query when there was time constraint,
but they were more relaxed and might browse search result
lists orderly when there was no time constraint. As the
search processed, users’ interactions became similar, and
the only difference was that users with time constraint
would select a small number of pages to read.
Limitations and Future work
We acknowledge the limitation of this study. The time
constraint we manipulated was five-minute limit for each
search task. This is somewhat artificial. In real life,
searchers sometimes had time constraint or very limited
time before deadline to accomplish some search tasks, but
may not be five-minute specifically. The reason we set
five-minute limit was to induce severe time constraint in
searching, since some of previous studies did not find much
effect of time constraint when the time limit was set as
“high” or “moderate” availability. Also, the tasks were of
only two types in our study: fact finding and understanding,
which equivalent to the two lower levels of Anderson and
Krathwohl’s Taxonomy of Learning. This is a limited range
comparing to users may encounter in their real life. Future
research may consider conducting naturalistic study and
include higher level type of tasks to investigate the effect of
time constraints on search interactions and search
experience in real life.
Another limitation is that time constraint was designed as
within-subject in our experiment. The rationale is to
compare the difference of search strategies with and
without time constraint and rule out the possible individual
differences. We acknowledge that in the within-subject
design, one condition the participant experienced may
influence how they perform in the second condition. In
order to eliminate such effect, we asked participants to take
a five-minute break after they have finished two search
tasks in one condition. The participants were also told that
the goal of this experiment was not to test their search skills
with and without time constraint, but to investigate how the
search system could provide assistant for information
search in different contexts. The order of search tasks and
time conditions was systematically balanced using 2x2
Graeco-Latin Square design, to rule out the possible order
effect.
This study examined how users interacted on search result
pages and content pages during query interval, including
the first and mean dwell time on different pages, the
number of pages viewed and other interactions during
query intervals. The results demonstrated users might
change their search strategies when given severe time
constraint, especially in their first query interval. Such
results also indicate that users’ interactions during the first
query interval could reflect their time context. This result is
consistent in previous studies (e.g. [21]), which
demonstrated the beginning of the search could indicate
users’ search contexts. Future research may examine users’
cursor movements and eye gaze movements to fully
understand how users read or browse the search results, and
further verify some of the explanations in this study.
CONCLUSION
This study examined the effects of time constraints on
searchers’ information search strategies at two search
stages (first query interval and end point). A user
experiment was conducted, in which participants were
asked to search for two tasks with different time conditions.
The results showed users did employ different search
strategies when searching with and without time constraint,
and their search strategies changed over time within the
search session. Generally, when there was no time
constraint, users often took the first query as a trial of
search and tended to employ economic-style search
strategy. They spent short time on SERPs, viewed one/two
content pages before reformulating the query. When given
time constraint, users became more selective and cautious
in examining the search results, and they spent longer time
on SERPs but only selected one/two content pages to read
during the first query interval. As the search processed,
users with and without constraint both employed similar
search strategy—they became similar in their reading
patterns on SERPs and content pages, but users with time
constraint were still selective and only read one/two content
pages per query. Future work will expand the behavioral
features set to include mouse movements and keyboard
activities to fully understand users’ search strategies under
time constraint. The findings of this study have
implications for search system design to assist searchers
under time constraint and help them search more
effectively and efficiently.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
This research is funded by NSFC #71303015.
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