Web Search: Emerging Patterns

THISARTICLE E X A M I N E S the public searching of the Web and provides an overview of recent research exploring what we know about how people search the Web. The article reports selected findings from studies conducted from 1997to 2002 using large-scale Web user data provided by commercial Web companies, including Excite, AskJeeves, and AlltheWeb.com. We examined what topics people search for on the Web; how people search the Web using keywords in queries during search sessions; and the different types of searches conducted for multimedia, medical, e-commerce, sex, etc., information. Key findings include changes and differences in search topics over time, including a shift from entertainment to e-commerce searching by largely North American users. Findings show little change in current patterns of Web searching by many users from short queries and sessions. Alternatively, we see more complex searching behaviors by some users, including successive and multitasking searches.