Important Dates

  • Submissions: 10 20th June 2014
  • Notifications: 30th June 2014
  • IIiX EarlyBird Reg: 7th July 2014
  • Camera Ready: 1st August 2014
  • Workshop: 30th August 2014

 

Previous Workshop

Read about the Searching4Fun 2012 Workshop and look at the papers in Searching4Fun 2012 Proceedings.

 

Twitter

We'll be using the #search4fun hashtag where possible

 

 

About the Workshop

There has been a growing research interest in Searching for Fun, not to find fun, but because it is fun, or part of something fun. Searching for pass time, relax, have fun, and enjoy yourself. From videos, to photos, to funny blogs, etc to casual information relating to fun activities.

This research area has led to a number of workshops, including the 2012 workshop on Searching4Fun, and a focus group at the recent Evaluation of IR Dagstuhl event.

Research has begun to show that during casual-leisure search, peoples’ intentions, their motivations, their criteria for success, and their querying behaviour all differ from typical web search, whilst potentially representing a significant portion of search queries. This workshop will investigate searching for fun, or casual-leisure search, and aims to understand this increasingly important type of searching, bring together relevant IR sub-communities (e.g. recommender systems, result diversity, multimedia retrieval) and related disciplines, discuss new and early research, and create a vision for future work in this area.

Searching for fun can be different in several ways:

  • Many search sessions are not initiated in response to a specific information need, but in response to a mood or physical state, a desire to be distracted from some aspect of life, or just in a response to having some free time.
  • These needs can be met without eventually finding specific information, despite finding lots of results.
  • Any Information needs in these sessions are optional and often transient.
  • If an Information need is present, actually resolving them is also optional.

There are lots of other open questions relating to searching for fun: What are people’s querying patterns like in these situations? How can systems, models, and algorithms better support users in this behaviour? What are the best approaches or measures to evaluate solutions? These are important questions for the domain of information retrieval, and so ECIR is a key venue for gathering searchers from around the world to talk about searching for fun.

Find out More

See details of the Searching4Fun 2012 workshop, and the Searching4Fun 2012 Proceedings.

Read the proposal document for the last event.

Read the Dagstuhl Summary for the focus group (p119).

See our Dagstuhl Searching for Fun Slides below

Fun information Interaction #Seaching4fun from Max Wilson