Where should the person stop and the information search interface start?
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
Lexical ambiguity and information retrieval
ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS)
Word sense disambiguation and information retrieval
SIGIR '94 Proceedings of the 17th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
The anatomy of a large-scale hypertextual Web search engine
WWW7 Proceedings of the seventh international conference on World Wide Web 7
Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal
A review of web searching studies and a framework for future research
Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
Mining Generalized Query Patterns from Web Logs
HICSS '01 Proceedings of the 34th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences ( HICSS-34)-Volume 5 - Volume 5
How are we searching the world wide web?: a comparison of nine search engine transaction logs
Information Processing and Management: an International Journal - Special issue: Formal methods for information retrieval
HLT '02 Proceedings of the second international conference on Human Language Technology Research
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In this paper, an analysis of word ambiguity is conducted on an Excite Search Engine query log consisting of 52,167 queries. Each query is analyzed for each term and if any interaction of terms with queries reduces ambiguity. The data supports the conjecture that merely adding additional terms to a short (five or fewer terms) query statement is insignificant in reducing the ambiguity of the terms being searched for. Specifically, it is shown that regardless of the number of terms, typically one to five words in a query, the search remains ambiguous. The average query length is 2.21 words, and two search words will be shown to provide the least ambiguous results. In addition, it will be shown that a search with at least one unambiguous word tends to produce unambiguous search results, while the opposite tends not to be true, that adding terms does not help reduce ambiguity.