JIN Kotake

The ability to retrieve needed information from the various types of information available on the Internet is becoming increasingly important. Although a query recommendation is a common search aid, we believe that users need to be able to create their own keywords when attempting to select a proper query. In this paper, we investigate how presenting a search UI when entering search keywords during a web search applying a fill-in-the-blank template (i.e., the Search UI with Fill-in-the-Blank), which reads "I want to know [BLANK] of [BLANK]," affects the ability to create a search query. As a result, the questionnaire evaluation and a user log analysis showed that although the Search UI with Fill-in-the-Blank is burdensome in terms of clarifying information requests of the users, it is effective for allowing the users to create specific queries.