An analysis of Web searching by European AlltheWeb.com users

doi:10.1016/S0306-4573(03)00067-0

Information Processing & Management

Volume 41, Issue 2, March 2005, Pages 361-381

https://doi.org/10.1016/S0306-4573(03)00067-0 Get rights and content

Abstract

The Web has become a worldwide source of information and a mainstream business tool. It is changing the way people conduct the daily business of their lives. As these changes are occurring, we need to understand what Web searching trends are emerging within the various global regions. What are the regional differences and trends in Web searching, if any? What is the effectiveness of Web search engines as providers of information? As part of a body of research studying these questions, we have analyzed two data sets collected from queries by mainly European users submitted to AlltheWeb.com on 6 February 2001 and 28 May 2002. AlltheWeb.com is a major and highly rated European search engine. Each data set contains approximately a million queries submitted by over 200,000 users and spans a 24-h period. This longitudinal benchmark study shows that European Web searching is evolving in certain directions. There was some decline in query length, with extremely simple queries. European search topics are broadening, with a notable percentage decline in sexual and pornographic searching. The majority of Web searchers view fewer than five Web documents, spending only seconds on a Web document. Approximately 50% of the Web documents viewed by these European users were topically relevant. We discuss the implications for Web information systems and information content providers.

Introduction

The Web is changing the way many people locate information. As the Web is becoming a worldwide phenomenon, we need to understand what searching trends are emerging. These trends include how searchers utilize Web search engines in the search process and the viewing of Web documents. There is a growing body of Web research concerning how users interact with Web search engines (Spink, Jansen, Wolfram, & Saracevic, 2002). However, the majority of research in this area has focused on users of United States Web search engines. There is a need to understand what searching trends are emerging within different global regions. To our knowledge, there has been limited large-scale research examining the interactions of users with European Web search engines. Examining the Web searching behavior of different users from different world regions is an important area of research with potential to impact our understanding of global Web search and the design of Web search engines.

In this paper, we examine the interactions of the users of a major and predominantly European search engine. We report general searching characteristics and trends, including session duration, query length, languages, and result pages viewed. We also examine the number of Web documents viewed, and analyze the relationship between sessions, queries, and pages viewed. Finally, we evaluate the success of these searches by analyzing the topical relevance of documents retrieved and viewed.

We begin with a review of the literature, followed by the research design utilized to obtain and analyze this Web search engine data. We use these Web queries to isolate trends in searching and page viewing, also known as click through or page view data (i.e., the Web page/s a user visits when following a hyperlink from a search engine results page). This analysis includes the temporal aspects of Web page viewing. We discuss the implications of these results for Web search engine users and designers, and Web sites targeting the European market. We conclude with directions for future research.

Section snippets

Web searching

There is a growing body of research examining the search patterns of users of predominantly US search engines (Jansen & Pooch, 2001; Jansen, Spink, & Saracevic, 2000; Silverstein, Henzinger, Marais, & Moricz, 1999; Spink et al., 2002). Jansen and Pooch (2001) present an extensive review of the Web searching literature, reporting that Web searchers exhibit different search techniques than do searchers on other information systems. Jansen et al. (2000) conducted an in-depth analysis of the user

Research questions

The research questions driving this study are:

(1)
What are the trends in Web searching characteristics by European users of the AlltheWeb.com search engines?
(2)
How many Web documents do AlltheWeb.com European Web search engine users' view, and how long do they spend viewing these documents?
(3)
How topically relevant are the Web documents they are viewing?

These issues are important for the examination of European Web searching, as the Web becomes a more global tool for information searching.

Data collection

We obtained, and quantitatively analyzed, actual queries submitted to AlltheWeb.com,⁵ a major European Web search engine at the time of the study owned by FAST. Since the study, an outside company has purchased the FAST corporation (Kane, 2003). According to AlltheWeb.com personnel, most European users of AlltheWeb.com are from Norway and Germany. All queries were submitted to the European Web site for the AlltheWeb.com search engine. The queries examined for this study

Results

In the following sections, we report the results of our analysis.

Discussion

Our study identified some interesting searching patterns by AlltheWeb.com users. Web searching by these European users trended toward greater simplicity from 2001 to 2002. Queries decreased in length and sessions were shorter. Sessions were temporally short, about 15 min on average. About 25% of the sessions were less than 5 min. Boolean usage was almost non-existent. The range of topics searched for increased, and the users employed a greater variety of terms.

These searchers are generally

Conclusion

Our results provide important insights into the current state of European Web searching and Web usage. The short sessions lengths combined with short queries of many Web searchers are puzzling issues for designers of Web information systems. This does not seem to be a successful strategy to maximize recall or precision, the standard metrics for information retrieval system performance. However, it appears that Web search engine users are finding topically relevant information with this

Acknowledgements

We thank AlltheWeb.com and especially Per Gunan Auran for providing the Web query data sets without which this research could not have been conducted.

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An analysis of Web searching by European AlltheWeb.com users

Abstract

Introduction

Section snippets

Web searching

Research questions

Data collection

Results

Discussion

Conclusion

Acknowledgements

Information Processing and Management

Information Processing and Management

International Journal of Computer and Telecommunications Networking

Information Processing and Management

Web user studies: a review and framework for future work

Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology