What is Exploratory Search?
Mar 8, 2012

When I explain to people what are we working on, I try not to mention the term “exploratory search” because almost no one has any idea about what it is. I’ll try to collate some definitions and provide an example of a task when the exploratory search is needed.

Overview

One of the definitions I like was given in the recent paper from FXPAL (Fuji Xerox Palo Alto Laboratory) titled  Interactive Information Seeking via Selective Application of Contextual Knowledge:

Exploratory search is often characterized by an evolving information need and the likelihood that the information sought is distributed across multiple documents. Thus the goal of the search process is not to formulate the perfect query or to find the ideal document, but to collect information through a variety of means, and to combine the discovered information to achieve a coherent understanding of some topic.

A good outline of this paper was  posted by Jin Y. Kim.

In the Wikipedia article on exploratory search, it is defined as:

Exploratory search is a specialization of information exploration which represents the activities carried out by searchers who are either: a) unfamiliar with the domain of their goal (i.e. need to learn about the topic in order to understand how to achieve their goal) b) unsure about the ways to achieve their goals (either the technology or the process) c) or even unsure about their goals in the first place.

Gary Marchionini, in his paper Exploratory Search: From Finding to Understanding, approaches exploratory search as:

a blend of querying and browsing strategies.

For an interesting, albeit very abstract, description of possible user interactions during exploratory search activities, see this post by Laurence Noel. my opinion, the “information space” described in this post lacks another very important dimension, that is of time.

The need for the emergence of exploratory search tools is recognized by leading experts in the enterprise software solutions industry, such as John Porter of Vivisimo (see his post on exploratory search here).

An Example

Imagine you are a finance student or professional. You want to learn what’s been published in the top 25 financial blogs in the last month. That would be about 7,000 blog posts. You can go ahead and read all of them, of course. You must be quite a fast reader if you still want to keep up on your other responsibilities.

The way you can approach your task is to start reading the recent posts. As you gain more knowledge about possible topics you are interested in and you will narrow down your interests. After that you will need to come up with relevant  search queries that you will need to type in a search engine to narrow down the results.

However, there is a number of drawbacks of this approach:

Of course, this problem has already been identified by many. Below are some examples of applications that feature some exploratory search capabilities. However, I think that all of them are still providing only rudimentary capabilities for exploratory search, and there is much more to be discovered and implemented.

Current Solutions

These solutions are highly biased towards application to news. But there are a lot of other areas that would benefit from a similar approach. If you think widely enough, you can imagine that in the future, as we accumulate more and more data, all information navigation/search will converge towards the tools that are by nature exploratory.

In the future posts I will discuss more ideas related to exploratory search in more details. In particular, the following topics are very interesting to explore:

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