Library and Information Science Commons^™

Genre-Based Navigation On The Web, Barbara H. Kwasnik, Kevin Crowston, Mike Nilan, X. Liu, J. Cai

School of Information Studies - Faculty Scholarship

We report on our ongoing study of using the genre of Web pages to facilitate information exploration. By genre, we mean socially recognized regularities of form and purpose in documents (e.g., a letter, a memo, a research paper). Our study had three phases. First, through a user study, we identified genres which most/least frequently meet searchers' information needs. We found that certain genres are better suited for certain types of needs. We identified five (5) major groups of document genres that might be used in an interactive search tool that would allow genrebased navigation. We tried to balance the following …