A Study of Immediate Requery Behavior in Search
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
When search results fail to satisfy users» information needs, users often reformulate their search query in the hopes of receiving better results. In many cases, users immediately requery without clicking on any search results. In this paper, we report on a user study designed to investigate the rate at which users immediately reformulate at different levels of search quality. We had users search for answers to questions as we manipulated the placement of the only relevant document in a ranked list of search results. We show that as the quality of search results decreases, the probability of immediately requerying increases. We find that users can quickly decide to immediately reformulate, and the time to immediately reformulate appears to be independent of the quality of the search results. Finally, we show that there appears to be two types of users. One group has a high probability of immediately reformulating and the other is unlikely to immediately reformulate unless no relevant documents can be found in the search results. While requerying takes time, it is the group of users who are more likely to immediately requery that are able to able find answers to questions the fastest.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it