Improving Motive-Based Search

In complex search scenarios like planning a vacation or finding a suitable gift for a friend, the user usually does not know exactly what he is looking for at the beginning. However, this is the question that most search interfaces present as first step. In this paper, we discuss approaches for supporting the user in expressing a search query based on vague feelings and ideas. We therefore consider search interfaces on the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic level and discuss different mechanisms of these levels to support the first stages of the information seeking process.