We report on a study of how people look for information within email, files,
and the Web. When locating a document or searching for a specific answer, people relied
on their contextual knowledge of their information target to help them find it, often
associating the target with a specific document. They appeared to prefer to use this
contextual information as a guide in navigating locally in small steps to the desired
document rather than directly jumping to their target. We found this behavior was
especially true for people with unstructured information organization. We discuss the
implications of our findings for the design of personal information management tools.