Curiosity driven search: when is relevance irrelevant?

Abstract

Classical information search behaviour models based on work-task scenarios fail to explain common leisure search scenarios motivated by a hedonistic need rather than a defined information need. This paper presents work into such unstructured search driven by curiosity. In order to explore this hedonistic catalyst, a social media search application was designed in which the search experience is triggered by the user's spatio-temporal context during their exploration rather than query-response based information retrieval. We report a study with real users and a simulated casual-leisure search task where results indicated that relevance is not relevant for some searches.