Automatic Query Type Identification Based on Click Through Information

We report on a study that was undertaken to better identify users’ goals behind web search queries by using click through data. Based on user logs which contain over 80 million queries and corresponding click through data, we found that query type identification benefits from click through data analysis; while anchor text information may not be so useful because it is only accessible for a small part (about 16%) of practical user queries. We also proposed two novel features extracted from click through data and a decision tree based classification algorithm for identifying user queries. Our experimental evaluation shows that this algorithm can correctly identify the goals for about 80% web search queries.