Analysis of a very large web search engine query log
ACM SIGIR Forum
Web search behavior of Internet experts and newbies
Proceedings of the 9th international World Wide Web conference on Computer networks : the international journal of computer and telecommunications netowrking
U.S. versus European web searching trends
ACM SIGIR Forum
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
Sliding window technique for the web log analysis
Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web
Automatic task detection in the web logs and analysis of multitasking
ICADL'06 Proceedings of the 9th international conference on Asian Digital Libraries: achievements, Challenges and Opportunities
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Different Web log studies calculate the same metrics using different search engines logs sampled during different observation periods and processed under different values of two controllable variables peculiar to the Web log analysis: a client discriminator used to exclude clients who are agents and a temporal cut-off used to segment logged client transactions into temporal sessions. How much are the results dependent on these variables? We analyze the sensitivity of the results to two controllable variables. The sensitivity analysis shows significant varying of the metrics values depending on these variables. In particular, the metrics varies up to 30-50% on the commonly assigned values. So the differences caused by controllable variables are of the same order of magnitude as the differences between the metrics reported in different studies. Thus, the direct comparison of the reported results is an unreliable approach leading to artifactual conclusions. To overcome the method-dependency of the direct comparison of the reported results we introduce and use a cross-analysis technique of the direct comparison of logs. Besides, we propose an alternative easy-accessible comparison of the reported metrics, which corrects the reported values accordingly to the controllable variables used in the studies.