Introduction
nInformation seeking
nBerry Picking
nThe process engaged in by humans to change their state of knowledge
nWeb Information Seeking
nWeb:
nThe biggest digital library available ( > 2 billion pages)
nheterogeneous collection of information resources with minimal selection, organization, and retrieval standards
nDiffer from Traditional Digital Library
nNo real organization
nNo control of Input
nNo control of customer set
n
The World Wide Web has become the biggest digital library available. The number of unique indexable web pages has exceeded 2 billion and is still growing at a substantial rate [Lyman & Varian, 2000]. With such rapid growth of the Web size, it is almost impossible for a user to search useful information or navigate effectively through many of the Web documents. This increases the need for improved analysis and automatically searching on the Web. There has been much research on different ways of analyzing the content and structure of the Web.


What is Information Seeking?
Information seeking is the process engaged in by humans to change their state of knowledge.  It is a high level cognitive process that is part of learning or problem solving. To seek information implies the need to change the state of one’s knowledge.

Information retrieval is concerned with getting information from databases.
Searching is the behavioral manifestation of information seeking.