[Search-l] thought this might be interesting for the group

[jer]

http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2008-04/ps-rcw041008.php

Researchers classify Web searches
Although millions of people use Web search engines, researchers show  
that – by using relatively simple methods – most queries submitted can  
be classified into one of three categories.

Jim Jansen, assistant professor in Penn State's College of Information  
Sciences and Technology, worked with IST undergraduate Danielle Booth  
and Amanda Spink, Queensland University of Technology, to find that  
Web search engine users are doing primarily informational,  
navigational or transactional searching.

Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic,  
navigational searching seeks to locate a specific Web site and  
transactional searching looks for information related to buying a  
particular product or service.

The research was the first published work of its kind done using  
actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification.  
Researchers analyzed more than 1.5 million queries from hundreds of  
thousands of search engines users. Findings showed that about 80  
percent of queries are informational and about 10 percent each are for  
navigational and transactional purposes.

Jansen and his colleagues arrived at those results by selecting random  
samples of records and analyzing query length, the order of the query  
in the session and the search results. These fields helped the team  
develop an algorithm that classified the searches with a 74-percent  
accuracy rate.

"Other results have classified comparatively much smaller sets of  
queries, usually manually," Jansen said. "This research aimed to  
classify queries automatically.

"Our findings have broad implications for search engines and e- 
commerce if they can classify the user intent of queries in real time.  
This is why we wanted a computational undemanding algorithm," Jansen  
continued. "It proves the 80/20 rule that 80 percent of the cases can  
be achieved with these clear-cut methods."

The paper "Determining the informational, navigational and  
transactional intent of Web queries" will appear in the May 2008 issue  
of Information Processing & Management. The article is currently  
available online.

The Penn State researcher said he plans to continue this research  
using a more complex algorithm that will hopefully yield a 90-percent  
accuracy rate using similar searching criteria.