Web Search Engine Research

Provides an understanding of Web search engines from the unique perspective of Library and Information Science. This book explores a range of topics including retrieval effectiveness, user satisfaction, the evaluation of search interfaces, the impact of search on society, and the influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality.

Provides an understanding of Web search engines from the unique perspective of Library and Information Science. This book explores a range of topics including retrieval effectiveness, user satisfaction, the evaluation of search interfaces, the impact of search on society, and the influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality.

This book brings together results from the Web search studies we conducted from 1997 through 2004. The aim of our studies has been twofold: to examine how the public at large searches the Web and to highlight trends in public Web searching. The eight-year period from 1997 to 2004 saw the beginnings and maturity of public Web searching. Commercial Web search engines have come and gone, or endured, through the fall of the dot.com companies. We saw the rise and, in some cases, the demise of several high profile, publicly available Web search engines. The study of the Web search is an exciting and important area of interdisciplinary research. Our book provides a valuable insight into the growth and development of human interaction with Web search engines. In this book, our focus is on the human aspect of the interaction between user and Web search engine. We do not investigate the Web search engines themselves or their constantly changing interfaces, algorithms and features. We focus on exploring the cognitive and user aspects of public Web searching in the aggregate. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods within the overall methodology known as transaction log analysis.

This book is a second edition, updated and expanded to explain the technologies that help us find information on the web. Search engines and web navigation tools have become ubiquitous in our day to day use of the web as an information source, a tool for commercial transactions and a social computing tool. Moreover, through the mobile web we have access to the web's services when we are on the move. This book demystifies the tools that we use when interacting with the web, and gives the reader a detailed overview of where we are and where we are going in terms of search engine and web navigation technologies.

Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual's everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities. This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas.

This book presents a systematic study of practices and theories for query understanding of search engines. These studies can be categorized into three major classes. The first class is to figure out what the searcher wants by extracting semantic meaning from the searcher’s keywords, such as query classification, query tagging, and query intent understanding. The second class is to analyze search queries and then translate them into an enhanced query that can produce better search results, such as query spelling correction or query rewriting. The third class is to assist users in refining or suggesting queries in order to reduce users’ search effort and satisfy their information needs, such as query auto-completion and query suggestion. Query understanding is a fundamental part of search engines. It is responsible to precisely infer the intent of the query formulated by the search user, to correct spelling errors in his/her query, to reformulate the query to capture its intent more accurately, and to guide the user in formulating a query with precise intent. The book will be invaluable to researchers and graduate students in computer or information science and specializing in information retrieval or web-based systems, as well as to researchers and programmers working on the development or improvement of products related to search engines.

Internet research spans many disciplines. From the computer or information s- ences, through engineering, and to social sciences, humanities and the arts, almost all of our disciplines have made contributions to internet research, whether in the effort to understand the effect of the internet on their area of study, or to investigate the social and political changes related to the internet, or to design and develop so- ware and hardware for the network. The possibility and extent of contributions of internet research vary across disciplines, as do the purposes, methods, and outcomes. Even the epistemological underpinnings differ widely. The internet, then, does not have a discipline of study for itself: It is a ?eld for research (Baym, 2005), an open environment that simultaneously supports many approaches and techniques not otherwise commensurable with each other. There are, of course, some inhibitions that limit explorations in this ?eld: research ethics, disciplinary conventions, local and national norms, customs, laws, borders, and so on. Yet these limits on the int- net as a ?eld for research have not prevented the rapid expansion and exploration of the internet. After nearly two decades of research and scholarship, the limits are a positive contribution, providing bases for discussion and interrogation of the contexts of our research, making internet research better for all. These ‘limits,’ challenges that constrain the theoretically limitless space for internet research, create boundaries that give de?nition to the ?eld and provide us with a particular topography that enables research and investigation.

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.