  People searching for information occasionally experience difficulties finding
what they want on the Web. This might happen if they cannot quite come up with
the right search terms. What do searchers do when this happens? Intuitively one
imagines that they will try a number of associated search terms to zero in on
their intended search target. Certainly the provision of spelling suggestions
and related search terms assume that frustrated searchers will use these to
implement this strategy. Is this assumption correct? What do people really do?
  We ran an experiment where we asked people to find some relevant links, but
we prevented them from using the most obvious search terms, which we termed
taboo words. To make the experiment more interesting we also provided the
traditional forms of assistance: spelling suggestions and related search
suggestions. We assigned participants using a magic square to get no
assistance, one kind of assistance, or both. Forty eight people participated in
the experiment.
  What emerged from the analysis was that when people are frustrated in their
searching attempts, a minority soldier on, attempting to find other terms, but
the majority will stick with their original query term and simply progress from
page to page in a vain attempt to find something relevant. This confirms
findings by other researchers about the difficulties of query re-formulation.
Our finding will serve to inform the developers of user interfaces to search
engines, since it would be helpful if we could find a better way of supporting
frustrated searchers.
