Functional Faceted Web Query Analysis

We propose a faceted classification scheme for web queries. Unlike previous work, our functional scheme ties its classification to actionable strategies for search engines to take. Our scheme consists of four facets of ambiguity, authority sensitivity, temporal sensitivity and spatial sensitivity. We hypothesize that the classification of queries into such facets yields insight on user intent and information needs. To validate our classification scheme, we asked users to annotate queries with respect to our facets and obtained high agreement. We also assess the coverage of our faceted classification on a random sample of queries from logs. Finally, we discuss the algorithmic approaches we take in our current work to automate such faceted classification.