[ 2] http://devel-oper.yahoo.com/search/ boss/

for “candied herbs” with alternative activities, including searches for other things: “candied herbs torino,” “longboard sales,” “united airlines flight information,” “Brahmin handbags,” “turin shroud,” “Taryn Rose shoes,” “spime” (I have spared you my crude translations and the typographical and spelling errors.) Often I had many windows open at one time. I copied and pasted content I found that might be relevant into a text editor. I bookmarked potential sites for my friends to look at and translate for relevance. I looked at images of what could be candied herbs; I even found a video showing how to candy things at home. I asked friends by email and instant messenger; I posted photos to Flickr; I searched You Tube. My friends Twittered to ask their friends. I spoke to people by phone.

That was a lot of surf, send, and sift. I should say it was thoroughly enjoyable—a treasure hunt—and ultimately worth it to find and finally experience candied rosemary.

My story is not unusual; it’s mundane, even. We routinely engage in human-human, human-machine, human-multimodal representation, human-place (digital and physical) interactions and use multiple browsers, devices and displays, text editors, bookmarking services and applications, notepads and pens. Search is also social— we use the phone, email, social networking sites, and services to seek knowledge from others and to get people to look for things on our behalf.

Fascinated by the wealth of design and engineering challenges in this world of information finding, Cristen Torrey of

Carnegie Mellon University and I have spent this summer conducting field interviews, collecting stories of the hard-to-find-on-the-Internet—from people not knowing the words for things, to things for which there are no words. We have been charting examples of how people search when they don’t know the specific words or terms for the things they are seeking (domain language/literacy), when they don’t know how to articulate the concepts (not named and/ or complex concepts), and when the content or learning need involves visual, kinetic, or physical knowledge in the pursuit of an embodied skill, such as screen printing, bodycasting, or looking for yoga poses like “Happy Baby” when you know what it is but not what it is called. Our investigations have followed people as they triangulate between different media (words, pictures, videos) and social search sites and forums such as Yahoo! Answers and Flickr, where there are many examples of images that are posted with the title “What is this?” We have begun to characterize searches by first understanding people’s term, concept, and domain familiarity, and their willingness to expend energy becoming search strategy literate and/or to turn to collaborative seeking. And we have been looking at whether that which is sought has a name at all. Without getting too linguistically relativist, there are some things for which there are simply no words in one language or domain of expertise but an abundance in another language or domain. Suffice it to say, there are many strategies that people use to find the known and named (recall and

recovery searches), the known but unnamed (discovery and recognition searches), the undefined (recall, describe, and name), and the unknown and unnamed ( discovery and/or name).

Clearly, we are not all done in this research and design world of Internet search. There are open questions about what is the appropriate unit of analysis. To be concrete, did my search “ session” above start and end in one browser? Across several browsers? Did the search begin with the request and end with the purchase? Or did it end unsuccessfully with the failure to find a second source? Has it ended yet? What are the boundaries of the search experience, and what different kinds of tools are needed to support these different activities? What are the applications that will blur the boundaries between seek, search, browse, recommend, remember, and augment? How can we give the search experience some continuity, over time and place? Observing people engaged in ongoing inquiry and discovery over time, my group has designed an application for project-oriented, multi-media, iterative searches, so people can garner and glean in collaboration with others.

But we need a lot more research. Examples of rich areas include personalization and what that means to people, and considering how mobile search differs from desktop search. We need to design more effectively for domain-specific search. In this regard two of my favorite sites of late are Octopart (http://octopart. com/) and Shazam (http://www. shazam.com/music/portal). Octopart is a search site special-