avirr's search-log-analysis [47 articles]

Abstract

Note: OCR errors may be found in this Reference List extracted from the full text article. ACM has opted to expose the complete List rather than only correct and linked references. ...

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The authors describe a set of best practices that were developed to assist in the design of search user interfaces. Search user interfaces represent a challenging design domain because novices who have no desire to learn the mechanics of search engine architecture or algorithms often use them. These can lead to frustration and task failure when it is not addressed by the user interface. The best practices are organized into five domains: the corpus, search algorithms, user and task context, the ...

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In this paper, we report results of an investigation into the factors influencing the selection of sponsored links by e-commerce Web searchers. In this research, 56 participants each engaged in six e-commerce Web searching tasks. We mined these tasks from the transaction log of a major Web search engine, so the tasks represent real e-commerce searching information needs. Using 60 organic and 30 sponsored Web links retrieved by submitting these queries to the Google search engine, we controlled the quality of ...

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We investigate the application of a novel relevance ranking technique, cover density ranking, to the requirements of Web-based information retrieval, where a typical query consists of a few search terms and a typical result consists of a page indicating several potentially relevant documents. Traditional ranking methods for information retrieval, based on term and inverse document frequencies, have been found to work poorly in this context. Under the cover density measure, ranking is based on term proximity and cooccurrence. Experimental comparisons show ...

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This book focuses on the human users of search engines and the tool they use to interact with them: the search user interface. The truly worldwide reach of the Web has brought with it a new realization among computer scientists and laypeople of the enormous importance of usability and user interface design. In the last ten years, much has become understood about what works in search interfaces from a usability perspective, and what does not. Researchers and practitioners have developed a ...

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#1 READ THIS BOOK! (if you care about Search UI at all)

This is a fantastic book, fluent and readable and impeccably researched. The most thorough scholarship, the most complete of the the state of research in Search UI imaginable.

It doesn't hurt that she and the evidence agree with me about personalization (not as successful as it looks) and visualization of search results (ditto).

Chapters

1. 1: Design of Search User Interfaces
2. 2: Evaluation of Search User

Abstract

Quicklinks for a website are navigational shortcuts displayed below the website homepage on a search results page, and that let the users directly jump to selected points inside the website. Since the real-estate on a search results page is constrained and valuable, picking the best set of quicklinks to maximize the benefits for a majority of the users becomes an important problem for search engines. Using user browsing trails obtained from browser toolbars, and a simple probabilistic model, we formulate the ...

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A complete and cogent set of links to Information Retrieval materials including the newest textbooks, videos, and a bunch of interesting patents. ...

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Information retrieval (IR) has changed considerably in the last years with the expansion of the Web (World Wide Web) and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. As a result, traditional IR textbooks have become quite out-of-date which has led to the introduction of new IR books recently. Nevertheless, we believe that there is still great need of a book that approaches the field in a rigorous and complete way from a computer-science perspective... ...

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Covers various issues of intranet search, including indexing data stores, dealing with access control, working with content creators, usability issues, etc. ...

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People often repeat Web searches, both to find new information on topics they have previously explored and to re-find information they have seen in the past. The query associated with a repeat search may differ from the initial query but can nonetheless lead to clicks on the same results. This paper explores repeat search behavior through the analysis of a one-year Web query log of 114 anonymous users and a separate controlled survey of an additional 119 volunteers. Our study demonstrates ...

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Search engines can record which documents were clicked for which query, and use these query-document pairs as "soft" relevance judgments. However, compared to the true judgments, click logs give noisy and sparse relevance information. We apply a Markov random walk model to a large click log, producing a probabilistic ranking of documents for a given query. A key advantage of the model is its ability to retrieve relevant documents that have not yet been clicked for that query and rank those ...

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Query suggestion aims to suggest relevant queries for a given query, which help users better specify their information needs. Previously, the suggested terms are mostly in the same language of the input query. In this paper, we extend it to cross-lingual query suggestion (CLQS): for a query in one language, we suggest similar or relevant queries in other languages. This is very important to scenarios of cross-language information retrieval (CLIR) and cross-lingual keyword bidding for search engine advertisement. Instead of relying ...

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The practice of guiding a search engine based on query logs observed from the engine's user population provides large volumes of data but potentially also sacrifices the privacy of the user. In this paper, we ask the following question: Is it possible, given rich instrumented data from a panel and usability study data, to observe complete information without routinely analyzing query logs? What unique benefits to the user could hypothetically be derived from analyzing query logs? We demonstrate that three different ...

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We propose a faceted classification scheme for web queries. Unlike previous work, our functional scheme ties its classification to actionable strategies for search engines to take. Our scheme consists of four facets of ambiguity, authority sensitivity, temporal sensitivity and spatial sensitivity. We hypothesize that the classification of queries into such facets yields insight on user intent and information needs. To validate our classification scheme, we asked users to annotate queries with respect to our facets and obtained high agreement. We also ...

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Clicks on web advertisements are one of the major sources of revenue for search companies. Query rewrites significantly increase the coverage of web advertisements available. In previous work we focused on optimizing the relevance between the query issued by the web searcher, and rewritten queries used to place advertisements. In this study, we identify the features which are predictive of the click through rate during query rewriting by mining web search-click logs. We also compare the features which are predictive of ...

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The Web and especially major Web search engines are essential tools in the quest to locate online information for many people. This paper reports results from research that examines characteristics and changes in Web searching from nine studies of five Web search engines based in the US and Europe. We compare interactions occurring between users and Web search engines from the perspectives of session length, query length, query complexity, and content viewed among the Web search engines. The results of our ...

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Traditional search engine evaluation relies on a list of query document pairs along with a score reflecting the document relevance to the query. The score is generally a human assessment, but nothing is said explicitly about the actual user behavior. In this paper we illustrate with a toy model that once the user behavior is agreed upon, the human assessment can be eliminated and the engine performance can be evaluated based on the clickthrough data of past users. ...

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Detecting query reformulations within a session by a Web searcher is an important area of research for designing more helpful searching systems and targeting content to particular users. Methods explored by other researchers include both qualitative (i.e., the use of human judges to manually analyze query patterns on usually small samples) and nondeterministic algorithms, typically using large amounts of training data to predict query modification during sessions. In this article, we explore three alternative methods for detection of session boundaries. All ...

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The use of data stored in transaction logs of Web search engines, Intranets, and Web sites can provide valuable insight into understanding the information-searching process of online searchers. This understanding can enlighten information system design, interface development, and devising the information architecture for content collections. This article presents a review and foundation for conducting Web search transaction log analysis. A methodology is outlined consisting of three stages, which are collection , preparation , and analysis . The three ...

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Very session-oriented and detailed, with specific database table formats and SQL queries included. Does not talk about the Long Tail and Short Head or much about frequency and popularity. But it should save a lot of time and effort for everyone who is starting with log analysis.

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In this paper, we define and present a comprehensive classification of user intent for Web searching. The classification consists of three hierarchical levels of informational, navigational, and transactional intent. After deriving attributes of each, we then developed a software application that automatically classified queries using a Web search engine log of over a million and a half queries submitted by several hundred thousand users. Our findings show that more than 80% of Web queries are informational in nature, with about 10% ...

Abstract

research.microsoft.com/~jfgao/paper/IJPRAI02.pdf ...

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Uses aggregation, keyword analysis, query space, click analysis including times. Provides three models of user-search interactive: predictive clicks, Markov transitions, stationary probabilities. Also time distribution model.

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Server logs of search engines store traces of queries submitted by users, which include queries themselves along with Web pages selected in their answers. The same is true in Web site logs where queries and later actions are recorded from search engine referrers or from an internal search box. In this paper we present two applications based in analyzing and clustering queries. The first one suggest changes to improve the text and structure of a Web site and the second does ...

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Looking at clustering and vectorizing search terms from query logs. Two goals for log analysis: improving web site design for findability, and ways to improve search engine.

quote: words in the content of Web pages follow a Zipf's distribution which order is very different from the distribution of query words. This implies that what people search is different from what people publish in the Web.

Average number of pages clicked is about 2 per query.

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Compares the sessions within search logs of Blogdigger for May 2005 with those from Dogpile/Metacrawler for the same month. 81% of these queries were filters which created RSS feeds, a form of automated alerting.

ABSTRACT: Abstract. We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets

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This position paper on web information seeking and interaction draws on information seeking models to broadly describe the searcher‘s interactions and the functionality of the retrieved results page as supporting a process of concept forming. Viewing search as developing an information need enhances the supporting function of the presentation of the search results, beyond the more traditional function of relevance spotting. User studies to investigate the effectiveness of novel interfaces supporting search are essential, but there is a need for basic ...

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The problem of characterizing web content and evaluating search engine results in terms of relevance to the user’s intention has been an important issue in web research. Despite the large number of manually categorized web query datasets, which can be used for testing and tuning ranking algorithms, the evaluation problem remains unsolved because of the size of the web, the diversity of the query space, and the subjective nature of user satisfaction. In this paper we study Success Index (SI), ...

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We show that incorporating user behavior data can significantly improve ordering of top results in real web search setting. We examine alternatives for incorporating feedback into the ranking process and explore the contributions of user feedback compared to other common web search features. We report results of a large scale evaluation over 3,000 queries and 12 million user interactions with a popular web search engine. We show that incorporating implicit feedback can augment other features, improving the accuracy of a competitive ...

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Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the so-called "information need". But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with ...

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This paper proposes a new method for evaluating the quality of retrieval functions. Unlike traditional methods that require relevance judgments by experts or explicit user feedback, it is based entirely on clickthrough data. This is a key advantage, since clickthrough data can be collected at very low cost and without overhead for the user. Taking an approach from experiment design, the paper proposes an experiment setup that generates unbiased feedback about the relative quality of two... ...

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The performance of web search engines may often deteriorate due to the diversity and noisy information contained within web pages. User click-through data can be used to introduce more accurate description (metadata) for web pages, and to improve the search performance. However, noise and incompleteness, sparseness, and the volatility of web pages and queries are three major challenges for research work on user click-through log mining. In this paper, we propose a novel iterative reinforced algorithm to utilize the user click-through ...