Strohmaier M., Prettenhofer P., Kröll Mark
2008
Different Degrees of Explicitness in Intentional Artifacts - Studying User Goals in a Large Search Query Log
International Workshop on Agents and Data Mining Interaction ADMI'08
On the web, search engines represent a primary instrument
through which users exercise their intent. Understanding the
specific goals users express in search queries could improve
our theoretical knowledge about strategies for search goal
formulation and search behavior, and could equip search
engine providers with better descriptions of users’
information needs. However, the degree to which goals are
explicitly expressed in search queries can be suspected to
exhibit considerable variety, which poses a series of
challenges for researchers and search engine providers. This
paper introduces a novel perspective on analyzing user
goals in search query logs by proposing to study different
degrees of intentional explicitness. To explore the
implications of this perspective, we studied two different
degrees of explicitness of user goals in the AOL search
query log containing more than 20 million queries. Our
results suggest that different degrees of intentional
explicitness represent an orthogonal dimension to existing
search query categories and that understanding these
different degrees is essential for effective search. The
overall contribution of this paper is the elaboration of a set
of theoretical arguments and empirical evidence that makes
a strong case for further studies of different degrees of
intentional explicitness in search query logs.