“Where’d it Go?”: How People Ask After Lost Web Information

This paper investigates the way people described the difficulties they encountered when returning to information on the Web. It presents analysis of Web pages, collected via a Web search, where the phrase, “Where‟d it go?” was used. A number of interesting observations arose from this analysis, including that the path originally taken to get to the information target is commonly referred to during its re-retrieval, and that the temporal aspects of when the information was last seen were only important when considered relative to other events. While people expressed frustration when problems re-finding arose, an explanation of why the change had occurred was often sufficient to allay that frustration, even in the absence of a solution. The implications of these observations for systems that support re-finding in dynamic environments are discussed.