[Sigia-l] Are web users more sophisticated

[Karl Fast]

> A couple of years ago there was a statistic published that as much
> as 60% of the users to the Yahoo portal went and typed in URLs in
> Yahoo's search box. Does anyone know who the source behind that was,
> and what the current estimate may be.

Several studies of web search engine logs have appeared in the
academic literature. One of the reported findings was that a high
number of queries were URLs and not query terms.

While I don't remember specific figures, I don't think it was in the
60% range. Still, it was surprisingly high. I can't recall any
studies about Yahoo, only Altavista, Excite, and Google.

I have included references to some of these papers below. They may
not be available online for free, but try searching Citeseer
http://citeseer.ist.psu.edu/. These papers might not have the exact
figure you're looking for, but these are the kind of paper you'd
want if you're looking for these figures.


  Silverstein, C., Marais, H., Henzinger, M., & Moricz M. (1999).
    Analysis of a very large web search engine query log. SIGIR Forum,
    33(1), 6-12. http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/F99/Silverstein.pdf

  Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., Saracevic, & Tefko. (2000). Real life,
    real users, and real needs: A study and analysis of user queries
    on the Web. Information Processing and Management, 36(2), 207-227.

  Spink, A., Wolfram, D., Jansen, M. B., & Saracevic, T. (2001).
    Searching the Web: The public and their queries. Journal of the
    American Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(3),
    226-234.

  Wolfram, D. (2000). Query-Level examination of end user searching
    behaviour on the Excite search engine. In Kublik, Angela, Canadian
    Association for Information Science Proceedings of the 28th Annual
    Conference. Available: <http://www.slis.ualberta.ca/cais2000/

  Wolfram, D., Spink, A., Jansen, B. J., & Saracevic, T. (2001). Vox
    Populi: The public searching of the Web. Journal of the American
    Society for Information Science and Technology, 52(12), 1073-1074.

    
Now, these papers do not explain why people might do this. They are
quantitative analyses of the query logs. The researchers had no
contact with users at all.

However, Andrei Broder of IBM research has taken these results,
theorized about how people search, and developed a taxonomy of Web
search. Basically Broder is arguing that our classic model of how
and why people use information retrieval systems is incomplete. This
is important because IR systems are designed around certain
assumptions about what people do when using IR systems. If they're
doing different things then maybe search engines (and their
algorithms) should be designed differently. Good paper (short, too).

  Broder, A. (2002). A Taxonomy of Web Search. SIGIR Forum,
     36(2). http://www.acm.org/sigir/forum/F2002/broder.pdf



--karl
http://www.livingskies.com/