An investigation on a community's web search variability

ABSTRACT

Users' past search behaviour provides a rich context that an information retrieval system can use to tailor its search results to suit an individual's or a community's information needs. In this paper, we present an investigation of the variability in search behaviours for the same queries in a close-knit community. By examining web proxy cache logs over a period of nine months, we extracted a set of 135 queries that had been issued by at least ten users. Our analysis indicates that, overall, users clicked on highly ranked and relevant pages, but they tend to click on different sets of pages. Examination of the query reformulation history revealed that users often have different search intents behind the same query. We identify three major causes for the community's interaction behaviour differences: the variance of task, the different intents expressed with the query, and the snippet and characteristics of retrieved documents. Based on our observations, we identify opportunities to improve the design of different search and delivery tools to better support community and individual search experience.

REFERENCES

• 1: Eugene Agichtein , Eric Brill , Susan Dumais, Improving web search ranking by incorporating user behavior information, Proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 06-11, 2006, Seattle, Washington, USA [doi>10.1145/1148170.1148177]
• 2: Rodrigo B. Almeida , Virgilio A. F. Almeida, A community-aware search engine, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988728]
• 3: Andrei Broder, A taxonomy of web search, ACM SIGIR Forum, v.36 n.2, Fall 2002 [doi>10.1145/792550.792552]
• 4: Jay Budzik , Kristian J. Hammond, User interactions with everyday applications as context for just-in-time information access, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.44-51, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325776]
• 5: Jaime Carbonell , Jade Goldstein, The use of MMR, diversity-based reranking for reordering documents and producing summaries, Proceedings of the 21st annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, p.335-336, August 24-28, 1998, Melbourne, Australia [doi>10.1145/290941.291025]
• 6: Dervin, B. & Nilan, M. (1986), 'Information needs and uses', Annual Review of Information Science and Technology 21, 3--33.
• 7: Ronald Fagin , Ravi Kumar , D. Sivakumar, Comparing Top k Lists, SIAM Journal on Discrete Mathematics, v.17 n.1, p.134-160, January 2004 [doi>10.1137/S0895480102412856]
• 8: Laura A. Granka , Thorsten Joachims , Geri Gay, Eye-tracking analysis of user behavior in WWW search, Proceedings of the 27th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, July 25-29, 2004, Sheffield, United Kingdom [doi>10.1145/1008992.1009079]
• 9: Daqing He , Ayse Göker , David J. Harper, Combining evidence for automatic web session identification, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.38 n.5, p.727-742, September 2002 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(01)00060-7]
• 10: Hoelscher, C. (1998), How internet experts search for information on the web, in 'Proceedings of Web-Net'98'.
• 11: Peter Ingwersen, Information retrieval interaction, Taylor Graham Publishing, London, UK, 1992
• 12: Bernard J. Jansen , Amanda Spink , Tefko Saracevic, Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.36 n.2, p.207-227, Jan.1.2000 [doi>10.1016/S0306-4573(99)00056-4]
• 13: Thorsten Joachims, Optimizing search engines using clickthrough data, Proceedings of the eighth ACM SIGKDD international conference on Knowledge discovery and data mining, July 23-26, 2002, Edmonton, Alberta, Canada [doi>10.1145/775047.775067]
• 14: Thorsten Joachims , Laura Granka , Bing Pan , Helene Hembrooke , Filip Radlinski , Geri Gay, Evaluating the accuracy of implicit feedback from clicks and query reformulations in Web search, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.25 n.2, p.7-es, April 2007 [doi>10.1145/1229179.1229181]
• 15: Kyung-Sun Kim , Bryce Allen, Cognitive and task influences on Web searching behavior, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.53 n.2, p.109-119, January 15, 2002 [doi>10.1002/asi.10014]
• 16: Uichin Lee , Zhenyu Liu , Junghoo Cho, Automatic identification of user goals in Web search, Proceedings of the 14th international conference on World Wide Web, May 10-14, 2005, Chiba, Japan [doi>10.1145/1060745.1060804]
• 17: Mazlita Mat-Hassan , Mark Levene, Associating search and navigation behavior through log analysis: Research Articles, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.56 n.9, p.913-934, July 2005 [doi>10.1002/asi.v56:9]
• 18: Wanda Pratt , Marti A. Hearst , Lawrence M. Fagan, A knowledge-based approach to organizing retrieved documents, Proceedings of the sixteenth national conference on Artificial intelligence and the eleventh Innovative applications of artificial intelligence conference innovative applications of artificial intelligence, p.80-85, July 18-22, 1999, Orlando, Florida, United States
• 19: Daniel E. Rose , Danny Levinson, Understanding user goals in web search, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988675]
• 20: Saracevic, T. (1996), Relevance reconsidered, in P. Ingwerson & N. O. Pors, eds, 'Proceedings of the Second International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS): Integration in Perspective', Copenhagen: Royal School of Librarianship, pp. 201--218.
• 21: Saracevic, T. (1997), 'The stratified model of information retrieval interaction: extension and applications', Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science 34, 313--327.
• 22: Xuehua Shen , Bin Tan , ChengXiang Zhai, Context-sensitive information retrieval using implicit feedback, Proceedings of the 28th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval, August 15-19, 2005, Salvador, Brazil [doi>10.1145/1076034.1076045]
• 23: Barry Smyth , Evelyn Balfe , Jill Freyne , Peter Briggs , Maurice Coyle , Oisin Boydell, Exploiting Query Repetition and Regularity in an Adaptive Community-Based Web Search Engine, User Modeling and User-Adapted Interaction, v.14 n.5, p.383-423, January 2005 [doi>10.1007/s11257-004-5270-4]
• 24: Amanda Spink , Minsoo Park , Bernard J. Jansen , Jan Pedersen, Multitasking during web search sessions, Information Processing and Management: an International Journal, v.42 n.1, p.264-275, January 2006 [doi>10.1016/j.ipm.2004.10.004]
• 25: Amanda Spink , Dietmar Wolfram , Major B. J. Jansen , Tefko Saracevic, Searching the Web: the public and their queries, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.52 n.3, p.226-234, Feb. 1, 2001 [doi>10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1591>3.3.CO;2-I]
• 26: Kazunari Sugiyama , Kenji Hatano , Masatoshi Yoshikawa, Adaptive web search based on user profile constructed without any effort from users, Proceedings of the 13th international conference on World Wide Web, May 17-20, 2004, New York, NY, USA [doi>10.1145/988672.988764]
• 27: Teevan, J., Dumais, S. T. & Horvitz, E. (2005), Beyond the commons: Investigating the value of personalizing web search, in 'Proceedings PIA 2005: Workshop on New Technologies for Personalized Information Access', pp. 84--92.
• 28: Paul Thomas , David Hawking, Evaluation by comparing result sets in context, Proceedings of the 15th ACM international conference on Information and knowledge management, November 06-11, 2006, Arlington, Virginia, USA [doi>10.1145/1183614.1183632]
• 29: Anastasios Tombros , Ian Ruthven , Joemon M. Jose, How users assess web pages for information seeking, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.56 n.4, p.327-344, 15 February 2005 [doi>10.1002/asi.20106]
• 30: Voorhees, E. M. (2005), Overview of trec 2005, in 'The 14th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC 2005) Proceedings', Gaithersburg, MD, USA.
• 31: Wang, J., de Vries, A. P. & Reinders, M. J. T. (2006), A user-item relevance model for log-based collaborative filtering, in M. Lalmas & A. Tombros, eds, 'Proceedings of the Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR)', London, UK, pp. 37--48.
• 32: White, R. W., Jose, J. M. & Ruthven, I. (2001), Comparing explicit and implicit feedback techniques for web retrieva: Trec-10 interactive track report, in 'Proceedings of the 10th Text REtrieval Conference (TREC)', Gaithersburg, Maryland, USA.
• 33: Cheng Xiang Zhai , William W. Cohen , John Lafferty, Beyond independent relevance: methods and evaluation metrics for subtopic retrieval, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860440]

INDEX TERMS

Keywords:
community search behaviour, search context, search log analysis, web search