I found five behaviors interesting and want to factor these into how I think about “search” as an activity:
Behavior 1: Engaging in search with specific intent and a plan for follow through with the results. This might range from looking for a link, content to include in report, to making a purchase or building knowledge for a work project.
Behavior 2: Searching to satisfy curiosity; looking something up and seeing where it leads. Many seem to enjoy search as an activity that is totally extemporaneous, at least sometimes.
Behavior 3: We integrate search into our work activities in much the same way as we take notes, assemble documents, or forward documents to a colleague. It just seems to be part of our method of achieving an end result. We use searching as a skill like writing and it is clear that we each bring different approaches and skills to how we do it in the context of our work.
Behavior 4: Search is treated by many as a task rather than an intellectual exercise. However, people with research or library science backgrounds seem to approach search with more strategy and patience in seeking the result they are pursuing.
Behavior 5: There appeared to be a fair number who took pains to thoughtfully “dispose” of results in a way to assure their “retrievability” by themselves at a later date or by others.

Taken as a group, most everyone has adapted to search with varying degrees of unique behaviors and most are still working on ways of making search more efficient and productive. That said, a couple commented on being satisfied that it works as well as it needs to for them and they aren’t concerned with better tools or gaining more skill than what they have.

The eternal issues will always challenge us while technology will always enable the process: how to manage what we retrieve; assess it; and transform it into knowledge, usable or not, and then store it for re-use, re-thinking, and revising.