A taxonomy of web search-英文文献.pdf

A taxonomy of web search Andrei Broder IBM Research broder@ (Most of the work presented here was done while the author was with the AltaVista corporation. Abstract: Classic IR (information retrieval) is inherently predicated on users searching for information, the so- called information need. But the need behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (give me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g. shop, download a file, or find a map). We explore this taxonomy of web searches and discuss how global search engines evolved to deal with web-specific needs. 1 Introduction A central tenet of classical information retrieval is that the user is driven by an information need. Schneiderman, Byrd, and Croft [SBC97] define information need as the perceived need for information that leads to someone using an information retrieval system in the first place. But the intent behind a web search is often not informational -- it might be navigational (show me the url of the site I want to reach) or transactional (show me sites where I can perform a certain transaction, e.g., shop, download a file, or find a map). In fact as we show later, informational queries constitute less than 50% of web searches. The main aim of this paper is to point out this difference and introduce and analyze a taxonomy of web searches. Secondly, we show how search engines evolved to deal with these web-specific needs. The remainder of the paper is organized as follows: in section 2 we discuss the classic model for information retrieval; section 3 introduces a taxonomy of web searches; section 4 presents some statistics extracted from AltaVista surveys and logs regarding the prevalence of various types of searches; section 5 analyzes the evolution of search engines in light of this taxonomy; section 6 discusses some related work; finally, section 7 draws certain conclusions and