Consequently, research has begun to focus on defining the broader set of information behaviors in order to learn about the situations when a user is, or feels, limited by only having the ability to perform a keyword search.
In March 2008, an Information Processing and Management special issue[7][8] focused particularly on the challenges of evaluating exploratory search, given the reduced assumptions that can be made about scenarios of use.
In June 2008, the National Science Foundation sponsored an invitational workshop to identify a research agenda for exploratory search and similar fields for the coming years.
An example is faceted search which presents diverse category-style options to the users, so that they can choose from a list instead of guess a possible keyword query.
[12] As the tasks and goals involved with exploratory search are largely undefined or unpredictable, it is very hard to evaluate systems with the measures often used in information retrieval.
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, giving study participants a well specified task could immediately prevent them from exhibiting exploratory behavior.