We describe results from Web search log studies aimed at elucidating user behaviors associated with queries and destination URLs that appear with different frequencies. We note the diversity of information goals that searchers have and the differing ways that goals are specified. We examine rare and common information goals that are specified using rare or common queries. We identify several significant differences in user behavior depending on the rarity of the query and the destination URL. We find that searchers are more likely to be successful when the frequencies of the query and destination URL are similar. We also establish that the behavioral differences observed for queries and goals of varying rarity persist even after accounting for potential confounding variables, including query length, search engine ranking, session duration, and task difficulty. Finally, using an information-theoretic measure of search difficulty, we show that the benefits obtained by search and navigation actions depend on the frequency of the information goal.

Understanding goals and preferences behind a user’s online activities can greatly help information providers, such as search engine and E-Commerce web sites, to personalize contents and thus improve user satisfaction. Understanding a user’s intention could also provide other business advantages to information providers. For example, information providers can decide whether to display commercial content based on user’s intent to purchase. Previous work on Web search defines three major types of user search goals for search queries: navigational, informational and transactional or resource [1][7]. In this paper, we focus our attention on capturing commercial intention from search queries and Web pages, i.e., when a user submits the query or browse a Web page, whether he / she is about to commit or in the middle of a commercial activity, such as purchase, auction, selling, paid service, etc. We call the commercial intentions behind a user’s online activities as OCI (Online Commercial Intention). We also propose the notion of “Commercial Activity Phase ” (CAP), which identifies in which phase a user is in his/her commercial activities: Research or Commit. We present the framework of building machine learning models to learn OCI based on any Web page content. Based on that framework, we build models to detect OCI from search queries and Web pages. We train machine learning models from two types of data sources for a given search query: content of algorithmic search result page(s) and contents of top sites returned by a search engine. Our experiments show that the model based on the first data source achieved better performance. We also discover that frequent queries are more likely to have commercial intention. Finally we propose our future work in learning richer commercial intention behind users’ online activities.

Performance evaluation is an important issue in Web search engine researches. Traditional evaluation methods rely on much human efforts and are therefore quite time-consuming. With clickthrough data analysis, we proposed an automatic search engine performance evaluation method. This method generates navigational type query topics and answers automatically based on search users ’ querying and clicking behavior. Experimental results based on a commercial Chinese search engine’s user logs show that the automatically method gets a similar evaluation result with traditional assessor-based ones.

Due to the lack of in-built tools to navigate the web, people have to use external solutions to find information. The most popular of these are search engines and web directories. Search engines allow users to locate specific information about a particular topic, whereas web directories facilitate exploration over a wider topic. In the recent past, statistical machine learning methods have been successfully exploited in search engines. Web directories remained in their primitive state, which resulted in their decline. Exploration however is a task which answers a different information need of the user and should not be neglected. Web directories should provide a user experience of the same quality as search engines. Their development by machine learning methods however is hindered by the noisy nature of the web, which makes text classifiers unreliable when applied to web data. In this paper we propose Stochastic Prior Distribution Adjustment (SPDA)- a variation of the Multinomial Naïve Bayes (MNB) classifier which makes it more suitable to classify real-world data. By stochastically adjusting class prior distributions we achieve a better overall success rate, but more importantly we also significantly improve error distribution across classes, making the classifier equally reliable for all classes and therefore more usable.

presented based on earlier work on the modeling of online reading behavior and evaluating the reading process and its outcomes. Users complete a reading task by browsing the Web and writing a short essay. The online browsing data is captured in real-time, which, along with the essay, reflects the participants ’ online reading process. Verbatim Quotient Detection is possible which monitors the proportion of material copied from the Internet. A Latent Semantic Analysis component to evaluate sentence-to-sentence cohesion in the final essay is also described, and is in the process of being integrated with the main system. The system evaluation capabilities provide the participants with immediate feedback that is specific to their final essay in order to help them increase their online reading comprehension. It also archives data for research and

A significant portion of web search queries are name entity queries. The major search engines have been exploring various ways to provide better user experiences for name entity queries, such as showing “search tasks ” (Bing search) and showing direct answers (Yahoo!, Kosmix). In order to provide the search tasks or direct answers that can satisfy most popular user intents, we need to capture these intents, together with relationships between them. In this paper we propose an approach for building a hierarchical taxonomy of the generic search intents for a class of name entities (e.g., musicians or cities). The proposed approach can find phrases representing generic intents from user queries, and organize these phrases into a tree, so that phrases indicating equivalent or similar meanings are on the same node, and the parent-child relationships of tree nodes represent the relationships between search intents and their sub-intents. Three different methods are proposed for tree building, which are based on directed maximum spanning tree, hierarchical agglomerative clustering, and pachinko allocation model. Our approaches are purely based on search logs, and do not utilize any existing taxonomies such as Wikipedia. With the evaluation by human judges (via Mechanical Turk), it is shown that our approaches can build trees of phrases that capture the relationships between important search intents.