"A new age of search systems" by Ujwal Gadiraju with Martin Vesely as coordinator
Ujwal Gadiraju · ACM SIGWEB Newsletter · 2018
More than half of the world's population has access to the Internet today. Satisfying one's information need has never been easier and more ubiquitous. We can catch ourselves turning to web search with regularity to find information, answer questions, plan travels and explore a plethora of diverse content. During the search and consumption of information on the web, it is known that people canlearnthrough the acquisition of new knowledge or modification of their existing knowledge. Little is currently known about how a user's knowledge evolves through an informational search session, where the objective of a user is to learn about a given topic. In this newsletter, we discuss our recent work in `search as learning' that aims to enhance the understanding of knowledge gained by users in informational search sessions. Being able to estimate the knowledge state of users during their interactions with search systems will allow us to construct and improve learning experiences for the users. For example, learners can be served content that is suitable for their current knowledge state. We thereby highlight the importance of optimizing web search to satisfy learning related objectives.