Web log mining provides tremendous information about user traffic and search engine behavior at web sites. The behavior of search engines could be used in analyzing server load, quality of search engines, dynamics of search engine crawlers, ethics of search engines etc. Search engine crawlers are highly automated programs which are seldom regulated manually. These crawlers periodically visit th...

To date, most search theory study has focused either on analytical models of specific situations requiring rigid assumptions, or, as in the case of search and rescue, operational experiments aimed at obtaining detection probabilities for a variety of scenarios. Analytical search theory results provide bounds on empirical results. This research introduces an agent-based simulation approach to th...

The non-convex behavior presented by nonlinear systems limits the application of classical optimization techniques to solve optimal control problems for these kinds of systems. This paper proposes a hybrid algorithm, namely BA-SD, by combining Bee algorithm (BA) with steepest descent (SD) method for numerically solving nonlinear optimal control (NOC) problems. The proposed algorithm includes th...

Using a large data set on web browsing and purchasing behavior we test to what extent consumers are searching in accordance to various classical search models. We find that the benchmark model of sequential search with a known distributions of prices can be rejected based on the recall patterns we observe in the data. Moreover, we show that even if consumers are initially unaware of the price d...

Collaboration in the information seeking and retrieval environment is common, particularly when the search task is complex and exploratory. Multiple factors such as contextual features and task type can affect users’ query behavior. This paper presents a study investigating the effects of collaboration and task types on users’ query behavior. The study involves two conditions: collaborative sea...