Relevance for Browsing, Relevance for Searching

The concept of relevance has received a great deal of theoretical attention. Separately, the relationship between focused search and browsing has also received extensive theoretical attention. This article aims to integrate these two literatures with a model and an empirical study that relate relevance in focused searching to relevance in browsing. Some factors affect both kinds of relevance in the same direction; others affect them in different ways. In our empirical study, we find that the latter factors dominate, so that there is actually a negative correlation between the probability of a document’s relevance to a browsing user and its probability of relevance to a focused searcher.