How Writers Search
Matthias Hagen, Martin Potthast, Michael Völske, Jakob Gomoll, Benno Stein · 2016
Many writers of non-fictional texts engage intensively in exploratory web search scenarios during their background research on the essay topic. Though understanding such search behavior is necessary for the development of search engines that specifically support writing tasks, it has neither been systematically recorded nor analyzed. This paper contributes part of the missing research: We report on the outcomes of a large-scale corpus construction initiative to acquire detailed interaction logs of writers who were given a writing task on 150 pre-defined TREC topics. The corpus is freely available to foster research on exploratory search. Each essay is at least 5000 words long and comes with a chronological log of search queries, result clicks, web browsing trails, and fine-grained writing revisions that reflect the task completion status. To ensure reproducibility, a fully-fledged, static web search environment has been created on top of the ClueWeb09 corpus as part of our initiative.