A Temporal Comparison of Altavista Web Searching

A Temporal Comparison of AltaVista Web Searching Bernard J. Jansen School of Information Sciences and Technology, Pennsylvania State University, 329F Thomas Building, University Park, PA16802. E-mail: [email protected] Amanda Spink School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh, 610 IS Building, 135 N. Bellefield Avenue, Pittsburgh, PA15260. E-mail: [email protected] Jan Pedersen Overture Web Search Division, 1070 Arastradero Road, Palo Alto, CA 94304. E-mail: [email protected] Major Web search engines, such as AltaVista, are essen- is an important area of research that has the potential to tial tools in the quest to locate online information. This increase our understanding of Web searching, to advance our article reports research that used transaction log analy- knowledge of Web searchers’ information needs, and to pos- sis to examine the characteristics and changes in AltaVista Web searching that occurred from 1998 to 2002. itively impact the design of Web search engines. The research questions we examined are (1) What are the To our knowledge, there has been limited large-scale changes in AltaVista Web searching from 1998 to 2002? research examining Web-searching changes or trends. There (2) What are the current characteristics of AltaVista is a body of research focusing on the Excite search engine searching, including the duration and frequency of (Jansen, Spink, Bateman, & Saracevic, 1998; Spink, Jansen, search sessions? (3) What changes in the information needs of AltaVista users occurred between 1998 and Wolfram, & Saracevic, 2002; Spink, Wolfram, Jansen, & 2002? The results of our research show (1) a move to- Saracevic, 2001; Wolfram, Spink, Jansen, & Saracevic, ward more interactivity with increases in session and 2001), along with studies of a few other systems (Cacheda & query length, (2) with 70% of session durations at 5 min- Viña, 2001b; Hölscher, 1998; Silverstein, Henzinger, utes or less, the frequency of interaction is increasing, Marais, & Moricz, 1999). Although these studies provide but it is happening very quickly, and (3) a broadening range of Web searchers’ information needs, with the important insights into Web searching, further research is most frequent terms accounting for less than 1% of total needed that validates these results across search engines and term usage. We discuss the implications of these find- across time. This is especially important because Web infor- ings for the development of Web search engines. mation systems are continually undergoing incremental, and sometimes radical, changes. Research is needed to evaluate Introduction the effect of these changes on system performance and on user searching behaviors over time. Web searching has become a daily behavior for many peo- We address this need in the present study by examining ple, with the Web now the first choice for many people seek- logged Web search sessions of AltaVista,1 a major U.S. Web ing information (Cole, Suman, Schramm, Lunn, & Aquino, search engine. In this article, we analyze general searching 2003; Pew Internet Project, 2002). Given the Web’s impor- characteristics and changes, including session duration, tance, we need to understand how Web search engines per- query length, results pages viewed, and term usage. We form (Lawrence & Giles, 1998), how people use and interact address temporal issues by comparing data we collected in with Web search engines, and the Web-searching trends that 2002 with similar data collected in 1998 by Silverstein, are emerging over time. Examining Web searching over time Henzinger, Marais, and Moricz (1999). We describe our research design and our analysis of the AltaVista Web-search- engine data, followed by a discussion of results. We then Received September 23, 2003; revised January 13, 2004; accepted March 1, discuss the key findings and the implications of our research 2004 © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. • Published online 7 February 2005 in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI: 10.1002/asi.20145 1http://www.altavista.com JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN SOCIETY FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, 56(6):559–570, 2005 results for Web-search-engine users and designers. We con- shorter sessions from this temporal analysis of searchers and clude with directions for future research. a near total intolerance of viewing more than one results page. There has been little analysis of page-viewing characteristics of Web searchers at any finer level of granularity, al- Related Studies though Jansen and Spink (2003) report that Web searchers of There is a growing body of research examining the use of AlltheWeb.com view about five actual Web documents. The Web search engines (Cacheda & Viña, 2001a; Hölscher & researchers also noted a shift toward commercial searching Strube, 2000; Jansen & Pooch, 2001; Jansen, Spink, & on AlltheWeb.com, although there is less of it than on the Saracevic, 2000; Montgomery & Faloutsos, 2001). Cacheda Excite search engine. and Viña (2001a) report statistics from a Spanish Web direc- There are studies that examine searching on specific Web tory service, BIWE.2 The researchers report on page results, sites, rather than Web search engines. For example, Wang, queries, query operators, and terms. Hölscher and Strube Berry, and Yang (2003) analyzed 48 consecutive months of (2000) examine European searchers on the Fireball3 search data from a university Web site. Analysis was at the query engine, a predominantly German search engine, reporting on and term level. The researchers did not collect session level the use of Boolean and other query operators. They note that data. The results of the query analysis were similar to those experts exhibit different searching patterns than novices. reported in studies of Web search engines. The term analysis Jansen and Pooch (2001) reviewed the Web-searching liter- results were targeted, naturally, to the university domain ature, comparing Web searchers with searchers of traditional rather than the more general searching environment of Web information retrieval systems and online public access cata- search engines. logues. The researchers report that Web searchers exhibit These results are comparable to those obtained by Jones, different search characteristics than do searchers of other in- Cunningham, and McNab (1998), who examined searches formation systems, and they call for uniformity in terminol- on a university online digital library over several months, ogy and metrics for Web studies. and to results obtained by Croft, Cook, and Wilder (1995), Jansen et al. (2000) conducted an in-depth analysis of the who examined searches on a government Web site over sev- user interactions with the Excite4 search engine, and reported eral weeks. There are similarities in the results of these types that user sessions are short (i.e., few queries) and that Web of studies when compared with results from studies of major queries are also short (i.e., few terms). Montgomery and Web search engines, but there are also differences, due in Faloutsos (2001) analyze data from a commercial research part to distinctions in information content. Analyses of service, also noting short sessions and queries. This stream of searching on Web search engines and individual Web sites research provides useful snapshots of Web searching. are certainly complementary, but these are also distinct re- One limitation of these studies, however, is that they are search areas. snapshots with no temporal analysis comparing Web search We center our research analysis on the interactions be- engine usage over time. We could locate only two studies of tween the user and the search engine. Interaction has several major Web search engines that provided a temporal compar- meanings in information searching, although the definitions ison. First, Spink, Jansen, et al. (2002) provided a four-year generally encompass query formulation, query modification, analysis of searching on the Excite search engine using three and inspection of results lists, among others. Belkin and snapshots. They report that Web-searching sessions and colleagues (1995) extensively explored user interaction query length have remained relatively stable over time, al- within an information session and proposed 16 information- though they noted a shift from entertainment to commercial seeking strategies (ISSs) that users can employ. These strate- searching. The researchers show that on the Excite search gies focus on what information the user wants, unlike the engine, Web-searching sessions are very short, as measured research reported here, which analyze what the user does to by the number of queries. Users view a very limited number acquire the information. of result pages.5 The majority of Web searchers, approxi- Bates (1990) presents four levels of interaction: move, mately 80%, view no more than 10 to 20 Web documents. tactic, stratagem, and strategy. Using Bates’s classification These characteristics have remained fairly constant across and definitions, this research primarily focuses on levels one the multiple studies. and two (move and tactic) and provides glimpses of level Second, Jansen and Spink (2004) conducted a two-year three (stratagem). Efthimiadis and Robertson (1989) present study of AlltheWeb.com6 users. The researchers noted even and categorize interaction at various stages in the information retrieval process from information-seeking research. 2http://www.biwe.com/index.html Beaulieu (2000) identifies three aspects of interaction: inter- 3http://www.fireball.de

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