I recently published a paper with Dr. Toms' CMI lab about our search research that we did for INEX 2007. It is entitled "Task Effects on Interactive Search: The Query Factor" Site. Coincidently, it is in the proceedings for INEX 2007. Essentially is it about the experimental Wikipedia search system that we have been developing over the past year and looking at how users behave while they search when doing different tasks. Not surprisingly, user behavior differs depending on the task. Consequently, the results from this work provide motivation for developing specialized support tools for different tasks that assist users when they need information, perhaps as a software agent that mediates communication between them and the search engine.
Our preliminary results are in this paper. I mainly was responsible for developing the search system and doing some light user log mining. We are currently doing further analysis on the user logs and hopefully will be submitting a more complete paper later this year.
Anyhow, here is the abstract for the paper if you are interested:
The purpose of this research is to examine how search differs according to selected task variables. Three types of task information goals and two types of task structures were explored. This mixed within- and between-subjects designed study had 96 participants complete three of 12 tasks in a laboratory setting using a specialized search system based on Lucene. Using a combination metrics (user perception collected by questionnaires, transaction log data, and characteristics of relevant documents), we assessed the effect of goals and structure on search as demonstrated through queries and their use in interactive searching.