Web Search

A reference for anyone who teaches web search. Techniques and strategies, tips, and advice from web search experts.

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.

Today, Web search is treated as a solitary experience. Web browsers and search engines are typically designed to support a single user, working alone. However, collaboration on information-seeking tasks is actually commonplace. Students work together to complete homework assignments, friends seek information about joint entertainment opportunities, family members jointly plan vacation travel, and colleagues jointly conduct research for their projects. As improved networking technologies and the rise of social media simplify the process of remote collaboration, and large, novel display form-factors simplify the process of co-located group work, researchers have begun to explore ways to facilitate collaboration on search tasks. This lecture investigates the who, what, where, when and why of collaborative search, and gives insight in how emerging solutions can address collaborators' needs. Table of Contents: Introduction / Who? / What? / Where? / When? / Why? / Conclusion: How?

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.

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.

Written for lay people searching for information on the Web, this resource describes all Google Web Search features and tools in detail. All critical steps are illustrated with detailed screenshots.

Cross-device Web Search is the first book to examine cross-device search behavior, which takes place when people utilize multiple devices and several sessions to research the same topic. Providing a comprehensive examination of cross-device search behaviors, the book also models and analyses their most important features and, by doing so, helps to elucidate the motivations behind such behaviors. Drawing on a variety of methods and sources, including system design, user experiments, and qualitative and quantitative analysis, the book introduces cross-device search, relates it to relevant conceptual models, and identifies cross-device search topics. Providing discussion of a comprehensive range of behaviors in the context of cross-device search, including querying, gazing, clicking, and touching, the book also presents the design and development of a system to support cross-device search, explores cross-device search behavior modeling, and predicts users’ search performance. Cross-device Web Search will be of great interest to academics and students situated in the fields of library and information science, computer science, and management science. The book should also provide fascinating insights to practitioners and others interested in information search retrieval, information seeking behavior, and human-computer interaction communities.

Online user privacy is a delicate issue that has been unfortunately overlooked by technology corporations and especially the public since the birth of the internet. Many online businesses and services such as web search engines, retailers, and social network sites exploit user data for profit. There is a misconception among people about the term “privacy.” Usually, people think that privacy is the ability of an individual to isolate themselves or that it is a person’s right to control access to their personal information. However, privacy is not just about revealing secret information; it also includes exploiting user personal data, as the exploitation of personal data may lead to disastrous consequences. Protecting User Privacy in Web Search Utilization presents both multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary works on questions related to experiences and phenomena that can or could be covered by concepts regarding the protection and privacy of web service users. It further highlights the importance of web search privacy to the readers and educates them about recent developments in the field. Covering topics such as AI-based intrusion detection, desktop search engines, and privacy risks, this premier reference source is an essential resource for students and educators of higher education, data experts, privacy professionals and engineers, IT managers, software developers, government officials, archivists and librarians, privacy rights activists, researchers, and academicians.