How far will you go?: using need for closure and information scent to model search stopping behavior

Online searching plays a central role in daily life. During online searching, people first decide which queries to submit to an information retrieval system, after that they decide which links to click on, and based on the quality of search result content, they further determine whether to stop viewing the current returned result set or to refine the query. At some point a person decides to terminate searching. For tasks that require a single answer such as a navigation task, it is relatively clear when a person decides to stop searching -- he or she has either found, or not found, an answer to his or her question. However, for tasks that have no obvious end-point, it is unclear when and why people decide to stop searching and more importantly, it is unclear how to model such behavior. The research question of deciding when information is enough to complete one's task is mostly investigated under the term "search stopping behavior" [3], even though no formal definition has been given in the literature.