Evaluating user search trails in exploratory search tasks

We demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed evaluation criteria by measuring how the recommended search trails lead to improvements in both information space coverage and search performance metrics for users across multiple user search datasets. Based on the analysis results, we demonstrate that the order of the recommended search trails plays a significant role and it outperforms the random order of search trails thus being beneficial for the struggling users in improving their overall search effectiveness. We also show that by providing search trail recommendations, users are able to discover more information across multiple facets (in breadth) as well as investigate certain facets in more detail (in depth). These findings provide substantial evidence across multiple datasets to confirm that recommended search trails improve users' information seeking coverage and overall knowledge acquisition throughout their search processes.