Sue Dumais addressed a standing-room only crowd at the Yahoo! Mission College location on Tuesday, December 12 to discuss the concept of search in the context of work activities. She referred to usage experiences with the idea of having unified access to “Stuff I’ve Seen” – email, Web pages, files, news, appointments. Reuse is important, according to Dumais, as 70-80% of viewed Web pages are revisits.

Dumais also explained the importance of time in re-finding information, and pointed out the difference between absolute and relative time – the concept of “landmarks” in human memory and the way people remember events or general topics versus specific dates. She also explained the importance of metadata in supporting interactive retrieval instead of single hierarchies or ranked lists.