A cross-domain analysis of task and genre effects on perceptions of usefulness

Search systems are limited by their inability to distinguish between information that is on topic and information that is useful, i.e. suitable and applicable to the tasks at hand. This paper presents the results of two studies that examine a possible approach to identifying more useful documents through the relationships between searchers’ tasks and the document genres in the collection. A questionnaire and an experimental user study conducted in two domains, provide evidence that perceptions of usefulness are dependent upon information task type, document genre, and the relationship between these two factors. Expertise is also found to have an effect on usefulness. These results further our understanding of the role of task and genre interactive information retrieval.