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February 28, 2011 by Gary Price

Research Paper: Who Uses Web Search for What? And How?

February 28, 2011 by Gary Price

by Ingmar Weber and Alejandro Jaimes, Yahoo Research
From the Abstract:

We analyze a large query log of 2.3 million anonymous registered users from a web-scale U.S. search engine in order to jointly analyze their on-line behavior in terms of who they might be (demographics), what they search for (query topics), and how they search (session analysis). We examine basic demographics from registration information provided by the users, augmented with U.S. census data, analyze basic session statistics, classify queries into types (navigational,informational, transactional) based on click entropy, classify queries into topic categories, and cluster users based on the queries they issued. We then examine the resulting clusters in terms of demographics and search behavior. Our analysis of the data suggests that there are important differences in search behavior across di erent demographic groups in terms of the topics they search for, and how they search (e.g., white conservatives are those likely to have voted republican, mostly white males, who search for business, home, and gardening related topics; Baby Boomers tend to be primarily interested in Finance and a large fraction of their sessions consist of simple navigational queries related to online banking, etc.). Finally, we examine regional search di erences, which seem to correlate with di erences in local industries (e.g., gambling related queries are highest in Las Vegas and lowest in Salt Lake City; searches related to actors are about three times higher in L.A. than in any other region).

Direct to the Complete Paper
Presented at the Fourth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining

Filed under: Data Files, Journal Articles, Patrons and Users, Resources

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Information Retrieval/SearchWeb Search

About Gary Price

Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com. Gary is also the co-founder of infoDJ an innovation research consultancy supporting corporate product and business model teams with just-in-time fact and insight finding.

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