Tactics used when searching for digital video

In a world increasingly using multimedia materials, it is important for us to understand how people search databases for videos, and how the medium of the object in the collection may provide a context for those search behaviors. Specifically, this paper is concerned with the moves and tactics that 36 people used while conducting 141 searches of a video retrieval system. Transaction logs captured the participants' search strategies; each search move was coded and the data were examined for maximal repeating patterns (MRPs). Thirteen different search patterns (i.e., tactics) were used by the study participants; the tactics were mainly characterized by (1) the addition of concepts, resulting in a decrease in the size of the results set, and (2) frequent display and browsing of the search results. To explore the possibility that the multimedia character of the materials in the collection might affect people's search behaviors, these results are compared to results from an earlier study of search tactics used when searching a textual/factual database.