web search query
A web search query is a query that a user enters into web
Types
There are three broad categories that cover most web search queries[1]:
- Informational queries – Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., colorado or trucks) for which there may be thousands of relevant results.
- Navigational queries – Queries that seek a single website or web page of a single entity (e.g., youtube or delta airlines).
- Transactional queries – Queries that reflect the intent of the user to perform a particular action, like purchasing a car or downloading a screen saver.
Search engines often support a forth type of query that is used far less frequently:
- Connectivity queries – Queries that report on the connectivity of the indexed web
graph (e.g., Which
links point to this URL?, and How many pages are indexed from this domain name?).
Characteristics
Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult to come by[2]. Nevertheless, a study in 2001 [3] analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine showed some interesting characteristics of web search:
- The average length of a search query was 2.4 terms.
- About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries.
- Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page).
- Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.g.,
Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT). - The top three most frequently used terms were and, of, and sex.
Another study in 2005 of Yahoo's query logs revealed 33% of the queries from the same user were repeat queries and that 87% of the time the user would click on the same result[4]. This suggests that many users use repeat queries to revisit or re-find information.
References
- ^ Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schutze (2007), Introduction to Information Retrieval, Ch. 19
- ^ Dawn Kawamoto and Elinor Mills (2006), AOL apologizes for release of user search data
- ^ Amanda Spink, Dietmar Wolfram, Major B. J. Jansen, Tefko Saracevic (2001). "Searching the web: The public and their queries". Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 52 (3): 226-234.
- ^ Jaime Teevan, Eytan Adar, Rosie Jones, Michael Potts (2005). "History repeats itself: Repeat Queries in Yahoo's query logs". Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR '06): 703-704. DOI:10.1145/1148170.1148326.
See also
Information retrieval Search engine
External links
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