## 3 Methodology  
Thirty-one participants from the Greater Milwaukee area were recruited in the study after responding to fliers or newspaper advertisements. They represented general users of information with different gender, race, and ethnic backgrounds, education and literacy levels, computer skills, occupations, and other demographic characteristics. This study intends to investigate general public users with their real problems, so researchers asked users to select their own search tasks for the study. Each participant was asked to conduct two self-generated tasks instead of assigned tasks. However, two out of 62 tasks could not be analyzed because of poor quality of the recorded data, thus the total number of tasks being analyzed in this study was 60. Table 1 presents participant characteristics. Multiple data collection methods were applied to collect data. Thirty-one participants were invited to come to the Information Intelligence & Architecture (IIA) research lab at the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee (UWM-SOIS) to search for information for two of their own tasks: one work-related and another one personal-related. They were instructed to \"think aloud\" during their search processes. Their information search processes were captured by [PERSON], a \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c} \hline \multicolumn{2}{c}{**Demographic Characteristics**} & **Number** & **Percentage** \\ \hline \multirow{2}{*}{Gender} & Male & 10 & 32.3\% \\  & Female & 21 & 67.7\% \\  & 18–20 & 1 & 3.2\% \\  & 21–30 & 13 & 41.9\% \\  & 31–40 & 5 & 16.1\% \\  & 41–50 & 7 & 22.6\% \\  & 51–60 & 5 & 16.1\% \\  & 61+ & 0 & 0.0\% \\ \multirow{2}{*}{Native Language} & English & 29 & 93.5\% \\  & Non-English & 2 & 6.5\% \\ \multirow{2}{*}{Ethnicity} & Caucasian & 29 & 93.5\% \\  & Non-Caucasian & 2 & 6.5\% \\  & Expert & 3 & 9.7\% \\ \multirow{2}{*}{Computer Skills} & Advanced & 21 & 67.7\% \\  & Intermediate & 7 & 22.6\% \\ \multirow{2}{*}{Ethnicity} & Beginner & 0 & 0.0\% \\ \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: Characteristics of Participants (N = 31). usability testing software that not only records users' movements, but also captures their \"think aloud,\" including their feelings, thoughts, and intentions during the search process. Log data and think aloud data were the main sources of analysis for this study. In addition, participants were instructed to fill in a pre-questionnaire soliciting information in relation to their demographic information and their experience in using different types of IR systems and a post-questionnaire soliciting information in relation to their search activities and problems. This study also considers the effect of search tasks, which represent a task that determines what a user is searching for [23, 24, 25], on selection of search strategies. Researchers found that search task is one of the key factors affecting information seeking strategies [23, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30]. Based on [PERSON]'s [30] identification of search tasks, three types of search tasks, including known item search, specific information search, and subject search, were identified. For better understanding of the study, Table 2 shows examples of each search task type from our dataset. Since the authors are working on another paper examining factors affecting search tactic transitions and applications of different types of search strategies as well as the space limitation, the results of the effect of search tasks on types of search strategies are not reported in this paper. The identification of types of search strategies was based on the analysis of sequences of search tactics. In order to investigate the search tactics and their sequential patterns, the authors employed a coding scheme for search tactics developed mainly by [PERSON] [3]. The coding scheme consists of 13 types of tactics (Table 3). The authors were able to code think aloud protocols, as well as search logs using the scheme. For simplicity, each tactic has been represented by an acronym and italic font was applied to the acronym.