Online form-filling and transactions are extremely common, both for industry and government; and it is important to provide a satisfying user experience during these tasks if customers or citizens are to continue using online channels. However, reliable measures of experience in these cases are limited. Other areas of information interaction, e.g., online search, news, and shopping, are increasingly exploring and attempting to measure the concept of user engagement (UE). In this study, we ask whether UE is an appropriate outcome for the utilitarian activities of online form-filling and transactions.

Web search engines discover indexable documents by recursively 'crawling' from a seed URL. Their rankings take into account link popularity. While this works well, it introduces biases towards older documents. Older documents are more likely to be the target of links, while new documents with few, or no, incoming links are unlikely to rank highly in search results.

In real world use of test collection methods, it is essential that the query test set be representative of the work load expected in the actual application. Using a random sample of queries from a media company's query log as a 'gold standard' test set we demonstrate that biases in sitemap-derived and top n query sets can lead to significant perturbations in engine rankings and big differences in estimated performance levels.

A common motivation for personalised search systems is the ability to disambiguate queries based on some knowledge of a user's interests. An analysis of log files from three search providers, covering a range of scenarios, suggests that this sort of disambiguation would be of marginal use for more specialised providers but may be of use for whole-of-Web search.