Journal
JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Volume 62, Issue 4, Pages 761-775Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1002/asi.21492
Keywords
-
Funding
- Australian Research Council [LP077215]
Ask authors/readers for more resources
This paper reports on a transaction log analysis of the type and topic of search queries entered into the search engine Google (Australia). Two aspects, in particular, set this apart from previous studies: the sampling and analysis take account of the distribution of search queries, and lifestyle information of the searcher was matched with each search query. A surprising finding was that there was no observed statistically significant difference in search type or topics for different segments of the online population. It was found that queries about popular culture and Ecommerce accounted for almost half of all search engine queries and that half of the queries were entered with a particular Website in mind. The findings of this study also suggest that the Internet search engine is not only an interface to information or a shortcut to Websites, it is equally a site of leisure. This study has implications for the design and evaluation of search engines as well as our understanding of search engine use.
Authors
I am an author on this paper
Click your name to claim this paper and add it to your profile.
Reviews
Recommended
No Data Available