People tend to type short queries, however, the belief is that longer queries are more effective. Consequently, a number of attempts have been made to encourage and motivate people to enter longer queries. While most have failed, a recent attempt - conducted in a laboratory setup - in which the query box has a halo or glow effect, that changes as the query becomes longer, has been shown to increase query length by one term, on average. In this paper, we test whether a similar increase is observed when the same component is deployed in a production system for site search and used by real end users. To this end, we conducted two separate experiments, where the rate at which the color changes in the halo were varied. In both experiments users were assigned to one of two conditions: halo and no-halo. The experiments were ran over a fifty day period with 3,506 unique users submitting over six thousand queries. In both experiments, however, we observed no significant difference in query length. We also did not find longer queries to result in greater retrieval performance. While, we did not reproduce the previous findings, our results indicate that the query halo effect appears to be sensitive to performance and task, limiting its applicability to other contexts.@en

Health campaigns that aim to raise awareness and subsequently raise funds for research and treatment are commonplace. While many local campaigns exist, very few attract the attention of a global audience. One of those global campaigns is Movember, an annual campaign during the month of November, that is directed at men’s health with special foci on cancer & mental health. Health campaigns routinely use social media portals to capture people’s attention. Recently, researchers began to consider to what extent social media is effective in raising the awareness of health campaigns. In this paper we expand on those works by conducting an investigation across four different countries, while not only restricting ourselves to the impact on awareness but also on fund-raising. To that end, we analyze the 2013 Movember Twitter campaigns in Canada, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. @en