How Does Domain Expertise Affect Users' Search Interaction and Outcome in Exploratory Search?

People often conduct exploratory search to explore unfamiliar information space and learn new knowledge. While supporting the highly dynamic and interactive exploratory search is still challenging for the search system, we want to investigate which factors can make the exploratory search successful and satisfying from the user’s perspective. Previous research suggests that domain experts have different search strategies and are more successful in finding domain-specific information, but how the domain expertise level will influence users’ interaction and search outcomes in exploratory search, especially in different knowledge domains, is still unclear. In this work, via a carefully designed user study that involves 30 participants, we investigate the influence of domain expertise levels on the interaction and outcome of exploratory search in three different domains: environment, medicine, and politics. We record participants’ search behaviors, including their explicit feedback and eye fixation sequences, in a laboratory setting. With this dataset, we identify both domain-independent and domain-dependent effects on user behaviors and search outcomes. Our results extend existing research on the effect of domain expertise in search and suggest different strategies for exploiting domain expertise to support exploratory search in different knowledge domains.