When Search Engines "Speak" Your Language: The Role of Communication Accommodation Theory in Personalized Systems
Barbara Jo White, Jamison Posey, Sumali J. Conlon · Journal of the Association for Information Systems · 2004
Communication Accommodation Theory contends that speakers alter their communicative style to converge toward addressees to win approval and facilitate efficient communication.However, we know little about accommodation in computer-mediated text-based environments.In a lab experiment involving product search and choice tasks, users evaluated accommodating search engines that presented them with product search results containing familiar terms, defined as the user's search term for the products, and non-accommodating search engines that used less familiar, synonymous terms.Results showed that overall, users tend to choose products at the top of the results list, thus suggesting a relationship between serial position and choice.However, when results contained familiar and unfamiliar terms, users were more likely to choose products at the bottom of the list that contained their familiar term, thus reducing the effect of serial position.Included are managerial implications for personalization systems, product retrieval, and query expanded search result presentations.