Some Observations on User Search Behavior


Yuye Zhang
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.

Alistair Moffat
Department of Computer Science and Software Engineering, The University of Melbourne, Victoria 3010, Australia.


Status

Proc. 11th Australasian Document Computing Symposium, Brisbane, Australia, December 2006, pages 1-8. Reprinted in the Australian Journal of Intelligent Information Processing Systems, 9(2):1-8, 2006.

Abstract

We explore some issues that arise in the way that users interact with a web search engine, as evidenced by the records of their interaction provided by query and clickthrough log data. Our observations are derived from approximately fifteen million user queries recorded by the search.msn.com search service in May 2006.

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