Open AccessUnderstanding the brevity of Web queries
Author(s) -
Freund Luanne,
Toms Elaine G.
Publication year - 2003
Publication title -
proceedings of the american society for information science and technology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1550-8390
pISSN - 0044-7870
DOI - 10.1002/meet.14504001103
Subject(s) - computer science , world wide web , the internet , information retrieval , context (archaeology) , search engine , information seeking , web search query , information needs , web search engine , paleontology , biology
Introduction Internet search engines are the most common resource for people seeking answers to questions and access to webbased information, and in most search engines, keyword queries are the primary means of retrieving information. Yet, web queries tend to be remarkably brief and general. Although they have grown slightly in length over time, web queries are still on average about two words in length, which is significantly shorter and less complex than queries used in earlier types of information systems (Jansen & Pooch, 2000; Wang, Berry & Yang, 2003). Popular queries listed on the Google site, such as "weather", "moon," and "nature" serve as very coarse filters for the two billion indexed web pages, and return millions of hits. Given this scenario, it is not surprising that people are often frustrated by web searching, and that search success rates of about 50% are reported (Nielsen, 2001).