Examining task relationships in multitasking consumer search sessions: A query log analysis

With the advancement of the Internet, search has expanded to every aspect of our daily lives including online shopping. Previous research has discovered that the focused, one-time search task model does not apply in many real-life settings and people engage in multitasking sessions. In this poster, we examined the relationships among tasks in multitasking product search through query log analysis. We analyzed 2,910 users' 47,387 queries in 18,102 product search sessions from taobao.com, the biggest Chinese C2C e-commerce site. Results show that: (1) 35.7% of all search sessions were multi-tasking sessions; (2) users' issued more queries and spent more time in multitasking sessions, but the number of queries per task remained similar for mono-tasking and multitasking sessions; (3) about 80% of the tasks were unrelated in multitasking sessions, while the other 20% were hierarchical and sibling tasks. The results provide exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple product search tasks, and could be useful for query recommendation and product recommendation. Copyright © 2016 by Association for Information Science and Technology