WHO’S THE NEXT GOOGLE? Shift to Knowledge Age and Exploratory Search

Essentially, a search engine is simply a tool to meet users’ information needs, which should be updated based on users need changes. Since entering the knowledge era, the cutting-edge technology has proposed a much more efficient way to do known-item search through timely pushing you the information needed. On one hand, the tech has also been expected to enable a better experience for exploratory search, that could support people’s easy access to acquire knowledge from Internet. On the other hand, historical analysis based tendency forecasts the growth of information needs over time, including the prediction of how technology might evolve in the future to meet users’ growing expectations. This paper discusses four fundamental information needs and their correspondent search modes. The author recommend the analysis of users’ four information needs and their evolving characteristics shows clear changes in information-retrieval behaviour over time, which also brings attention on its influence on search engines in current cognitive/knowledge era.