Search engines are like mini-interviewers. We arrive looking for information and a search engine interviews us.

As a site owner, how do you structure your information architecture for easy search? As a marketer, how do you know what words to optimize for and when you dig up the top used phrases, do you make a separate page for each one? Wouldn’t that make for a gigantic web site that will confuse everybody? Welcome to information overload.

Search engines are like mini-interviewers. We arrive looking for information and a search engine interviews us. Whether or not you’re aware of it, search results actually influence where you may go next. In a paper called Shifts of Focus in Information Retrieval Interaction, David Robins of Louisiana State University writes:

During the course of information retrieval interactions, users may change the focus of their attention to various aspects of their information problem. These changes in focus, or interaction shifts are the subject of this paper. This phenomenon is readily observed in mediated database searching, from which careful analysis of the dialog among users, search intermediaries, and information retrieval (IR) systems reveals changes of search/interview focus.

He talks about a shift in focus, which can occur at any time during the dialog between a user and the “search intermediary.”

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