Detecting session boundaries on the Web is important for several reasons. Firstly, it is important to establish a common context for various statistics relating to user sessions and frequency of user activities. More specifically, it is important to detect some boundaries in order to group related information together for other applications, such as learning techniques for adaptive search engines. To date, however, the notion of a session on the Web has not been consistently defined, if it at all. The tendency has been to group the log data that has been made available from one user or IP address under the umbrella of one session regardless of the length of time covered by the logs. This tendency lacks a more user oriented view. Our argument is that a session on the Web can be defined as a group of user activities that are related to each other not only through an evolving information need but also through close proximity in time. Thus, we describe and discuss the investigatio...

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As experimental digital library testbeds gain wider acceptance and develop significant user bases, it becomes important to investigate the ways in which users interact with the systems in practice. Transaction logs are one source of usage information, and the information on user behaviour can be culled from them both automatically (through calculation of summary statistics) and manually (by examining query strings for semantic clues on search motivations and searching strategy). We have conducted a transaction log analysis on user activity in the Computer Science Technical Reports Collection of the New Zealand Digital Library, and report insights gained and identify resulting search interface design issues. Specifically, we present the user demographics available with our library, discuss the use of operators and search options in queries, and examine patterns in query construction and refinement. We also describe common mistakes in searching, and examine the distribution of query term...

One way to help all users of commercial Web search engines be more successful in their searches is to better understand what those users with greater search expertise are doing, and use this knowledge to benefit everyone. In this paper we study the interaction logs of advanced search engine users (and those not so advanced) to better understand how these user groups search. The results show that there are marked differences in the queries, result clicks, post-query browsing, and search success of users we classify as advanced (based on their use of query operators), relative to those classified as non-advanced. Our findings have implications for how advanced users should be supported during their searches, and how their interactions could be used to help searchers of all experience levels find more relevant information and learn improved searching strategies. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: query formulation, search process, relevance feedback.

When documents are collected together from diverse sources they are unlikely to contain useful hypertext links to support browsing amongst them. Manual, or semi-automated link creation is often infeasibly time-consuming for large document collections. We present Phrasier, an interactive system which automatically introduces links to related material into documents as the user browses and queries a digital library collection. Suitable links are identified using keyphrases that are identified within document text and support both topic-based and interdocument navigation. Previews of link destinations are provided to reduce unproductive link traversals, and important segments of document text are identified and highlighted to support skimming of viewed documents. Evaluation has shown that PhrasierÕs keyphrase-based linking mechanism produces sparse hypertexts, although similar documents tend to have short paths between them. A study using human assessors in a simulated document retrieval task indicated that the generated links are perceived to be useful and relevant.

Search engines continue to struggle to provide everyday users with a service capable of delivering focussed results that are relevant to their information needs. Moreover, traditional search engines really only provide users with a starting point for their information search. That is, upon selecting a page from a search result list, the interaction between user and search engine is effectively over and the user must continue their search alone. In this paper, we argue that a comprehensive search service needs to provide the user with more help, both at the result list level and beyond, and we outline some recommendations for intelligent Web search support. We introduce the SearchGuide Web search support system and we describe how it fulfils the requirements for a search support system, providing evaluation results where applicable.

We present a new application for keyword search within relational databases, which uses a novel algorithm to solve the join discovery problem by finding Memex-like trails through the graph of foreign key dependencies. It differs from previous efforts in the algorithms used, in the presentation mechanism and in the use of primary-key only database queries at query-time to maintain a fast response for users. We present examples using the DBLP data set.

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This paper describes an approach to detect distinct user sessions from the logs of a particular search engine. We present our work by describing the proposed algorithm and some interesting usage patterns that were detected. Some pitfalls of our approach are also noted. Finally, we give some insights on how web log mining could be exploited in other areas such as semantic relation extraction or query expansion. 1

This article details the methodology and analysis used in the Excite Research Project, a currently three year and still on-going research project to study the nature of searching on a major Web search engine. The article begins with general information concerning the Web, the unique and fascinating insights into searchers on the Web, and the Web's impact. The major thrust of the article concerns the structure and approached utilized to analyze the data sets so far. We end with conclusions and expectation for future Web studies. INTRODUCTION The Web is a whole new searching environment (Sparck-Jones & Willett, 1997), and therefore, a new category of user searching studies presents itself. For the past three years, we have been involved with an extensive research project focusing on an analysis of Web queries submitted by searchers of the Excite (http://www.excite.com) information retrieval system, a major Web search engine. The Excite project focused first on a data set of about 51,00...