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Searcher in a Strange Land: Understanding Web Search from Familiar and Unfamiliar Locations

Published: 09 August 2015 Publication History

Abstract

With mobile devices, web search is no longer limited to specific locations. People conduct search from practically anywhere, including at home, at work, when traveling and when on vacation. How should this influence search tools and web services? In this paper, we argue that information needs are affected by the familiarity of the environment. To formalize this idea, we propose a new contextualization model for activities on the web. The model distinguishes between a search from a familiar place (F-search) and a search from an unfamiliar place (U-search). We formalize the notion of familiarity, and propose a method to identify familiar places. An analysis of a query log of millions of users, demonstrates the differences between search activities in familiar and in unfamiliar locations. Our novel take on search contextualization has the potential to improve web applications, such as query autocompletion and search personalization.

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  1. Searcher in a Strange Land: Understanding Web Search from Familiar and Unfamiliar Locations

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '15: Proceedings of the 38th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval
    August 2015
    1198 pages
    ISBN:9781450336215
    DOI:10.1145/2766462
    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]

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    Publication History

    Published: 09 August 2015

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    Author Tags

    1. location-based search
    2. query language modeling
    3. search personalization
    4. web search modeling

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    SIGIR '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 70 of 351 submissions, 20%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    • (2015)The Role of User Location in Personalized Search and RecommendationProceedings of the 9th ACM Conference on Recommender Systems10.1145/2792838.2799502(236-236)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2015

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