A Study and Comparison of Multimedia Web Searching: 1997–2006 Dian Tjondronegoro and Amanda Spink Faculty of Information Technology, Queensland University of Technology, GPO Box 2434, Brisbane, Queensland 4001, Australia. E-mail: {dian, ah.spink}@qut.edu.au Bernard J. Jansen College of Information Science and Technology, The Pennsylvania State University, State College, PA 16802. E-mail:
[email protected] Searching for multimedia is an important activity for vast amounts of multimedia information, state-of-the-artWeb users of Web search engines. Studying user’s inter- searching systems need to effectively index the contents actions with Web search engine multimedia buttons, and select the most relevant documents to answer users’ including image, audio, and video, is important for the development of multimedia Web search systems. This queries that are based on the semantic or similarity percep- article provides results from a Weblog analysis study of tion. Content-based image, audio, and video search have been multimedia Web searching by Dogpile users in 2006. The given a lot of attention by researchers due to the grand chal- study analyzes the (a) duration, size, and structure of lenges in bridging the gaps between low-level audiovisual Web search queries and sessions; (b) user demograph- features and high-level semantics to support intuitive search- ics; (c) most popular multimedia Web searching terms; and (d) use of advancedWeb search techniques including ing (Lew, Sebe, Djeraba, & Jain, 2006;Yoshitaka& Ichikawa, Boolean and natural language. The current study find- 1999). ings are compared with results from previous multimedia However, despite promising research results, Web multi- Web searching studies.