skip to main content
10.1145/988672.988675acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesthewebconfConference Proceedingsconference-collections
Article

Understanding user goals in web search

Published: 17 May 2004 Publication History

Abstract

Previous work on understanding user web search behavior has focused on how people search and what they are searching for, but not why they are searching. In this paper, we describe a framework for understanding the underlying goals of user searches, and our experience in using the framework to manually classify queries from a web search engine. Our analysis suggests that so-called navigational" searches are less prevalent than generally believed while a previously unexplored "resource-seeking" goal may account for a large fraction of web searches. We also illustrate how this knowledge of user search goals might be used to improve future web search engines.

References

[1]
AltaVista, http://www.altavista.com.
[2]
AltaVista, description of Prisma query refinement tool, http://www.altavista.com/help/search/pp.
[3]
Anick, P. Using Terminological Feedback for Web Search Refinement: A Log-Based Study. Proceedings of SIGIR 2003, 88--95.
[4]
Bates, M. J. Information Search Tactics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 30, July 1979, 205--214.
[5]
Bates, M. J. The Design of Browsing and Berrypicking Techniques for the Online Search Interface. Online Review 13, October 1989, 407--424.
[6]
Belkin, N. J., Oddy, R. N., and Brooks, H. M. ASK for Information Retrieval: Part II. Results of a Design Study. Journal of Documentation, 38(3), Sep. 1982, 145--164.
[7]
Broder, A. A Taxonomy of Web Search. SIGIR Forum 36(2), 2002.
[8]
Google, Description of "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature, http://www.google.com/help/features.html#lucky.
[9]
Jansen, B. J. and Pooch, U. A Review of Web Searching Studies and a Framework for Future Research. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, 52(3), 235--246, 2000.
[10]
Rose, D. E. Reconciling Information-Seeking Behavior with Search User Interfaces for the Web. Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology, to appear.
[11]
Silverstein, C., Henzinger, M., Marais, H., and Moricz, M. Analysis of a Very Large Web Search Engine Query Log. SIGIR Forum, 33(3), 1999. Originally published as DEC Systems Research Center Technical Note, 1998.
[12]
Sherman, C. and Sullivan, D. The Search Engine 'Perfect Page' Test. Search Day 391 (Nov. 4, 2002), http://www.searchenginewatch.com/searchday/02/sd1104-pptest.html.
[13]
Spink, A., Jansen, B. J., Wolfram, D., and Saracevic, T. From E-Sex to E-Commerce: Web Search Changes. IEEE Computer, 35(3), 107--109, 2002.

Cited By

View all

Index Terms

  1. Understanding user goals in web search

    Recommendations

    Comments

    Information & Contributors

    Information

    Published In

    cover image ACM Conferences
    WWW '04: Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web
    May 2004
    754 pages
    ISBN:158113844X
    DOI:10.1145/988672
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

    Sponsors

    Publisher

    Association for Computing Machinery

    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 17 May 2004

    Permissions

    Request permissions for this article.

    Check for updates

    Author Tags

    1. information retrieval
    2. query classification
    3. user behavior
    4. user goals
    5. web search

    Qualifiers

    • Article

    Conference

    WWW04
    Sponsor:

    Acceptance Rates

    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,899 of 8,196 submissions, 23%

    Contributors

    Other Metrics

    Bibliometrics & Citations

    Bibliometrics

    Article Metrics

    • Downloads (Last 12 months)242
    • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)22
    Reflects downloads up to 14 Sep 2024

    Other Metrics

    Citations

    Cited By

    View all

    View Options

    Get Access

    Login options

    View options

    PDF

    View or Download as a PDF file.

    PDF

    eReader

    View online with eReader.

    eReader

    Media

    Figures

    Other

    Tables

    Share

    Share

    Share this Publication link

    Share on social media