Information Searching Tactics of Web Searchers

Information Searching Tactics of Web Searchers
Mimi Zhang
mzhang@ist.psu.edu

Another interesting paper that could help us develop and study our web logs. If used with the IE browser tool below, then this could give us a good image of our users.

Bates (1979)
A move made to further a search

Query Reformulation of excite users
32% did not submit more than one questy
When they did nodify a query
34% modified queries included the same amount of terms as the original ones
19% users reformulated their queries by adding a term
16% of them modified by removing a term

Web query reformulation model
Build up on saracevic’s stratified model
Three categories content format and resource
8 sub categories

This study
How do web searchers reformulate their queries?
What are the results of this effort?

Studied a 24 hour log from 9/9/2002

30% of the time people modified the nouns ie - subtracting nouns, noun after term noun before term.

Study really gets into the semantics of the search terms.

About 30% of time people subtract something – noun, phrase or conjunction

TC = topic change, so often times people changed the topic

This paper looks very interesting – I think we can get some interesting data from it that might be applicable to the search engine. We need to do something similar with our data, once we have it.