Temporal analysis of a very large topically categorized Web query log

  • Authors:
  • Steven M. Beitzel;Eric C. Jensen;Abdur Chowdhury;Ophir Frieder;David Grossman

  • Affiliations:
  • Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616;Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616;Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616;Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616;Department of Computer Science, Information Retrieval Laboratory, Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL 60616

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

The authors review a log of billions of Web queries that constituted the total query traffic for a 6-month period of a general-purpose commercial Web search service. Previously, query logs were studied from a single, cumulative view. In contrast, this study builds on the authors' previous work, which showed changes in popularity and uniqueness of topically categorized queries across the hours in a day. To further their analysis, they examine query traffic on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis by matching it against lists of queries that have been topically precategorized by human editors. These lists represent 13% of the query traffic. They show that query traffic from particular topical categories differs both from the query stream as a whole and from other categories. Additionally, they show that certain categories of queries trend differently over varying periods. The authors key contribution is twofold: They outline a method for studying both the static and topical properties of a very large query log over varying periods, and they identify and examine topical trends that may provide valuable insight for improving both retrieval effectiveness and efficiency. © 2007 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.