this study examined users' querying behaviors based on a sample of 30 chinese college students from peking university. the authors designed 5 search tasks and each participant conducted two randomly selected search tasks during the experiment. the results show that when searching for pre-designed search tasks, users often have relatively clear goals and strategies before searching. when formulating their queries, users often select words from tasks, use concrete concepts directly, or extract "entral words" or keywords. when reformulating queries, seven query reformulation types were identified from users' behaviors, i.e. broadening, narrowing, issuing new query, paralleling, changing search tools, reformulating syntax terms, and clicking on suggested queries. the results reveal that the search results and/or the contexts can also influence users' querying behaviors.