Web Searching in Chinese: A Study of a Search Engine in Hong Kong Michael Chau School of Business, University of Hong Kong, Pokfulam, Hong Kong. E-mail:
[email protected] Xiao Fang College of Business Administration, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH 43606. E-mail:
[email protected] Christopher C. Yang Department of Systems Engineering and Engineering Management, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shatin, New Territories, Hong Kong. E-mail:
[email protected] The number of non-English resources has been increas- query to a search engine. While most Web contents are in ing rapidly on the Web. Although many studies have English, there are increasingly more Web pages that are au- been conducted on the query logs in search engines that thored in other languages. Besides, many Web users are not are primarily English-based (e.g., Excite and AltaVista), only a few of them have studied the information-seeking native English speakers; some even do not know English at behavior on the Web in non-English languages. In this all. It has been estimated that only around 36.5% of Internet article, we report the analysis of the search-query logs of users are native English speakers (Global Reach, 2004). a search engine that focused on Chinese. Three months Consequently, it is common for users to perform Web of search-query logs of Timway, a search engine based searches for non-English resources. While most large com- in Hong Kong, were collected and analyzed. Metrics on sessions, queries, search topics, and character usage mercial search engines such as Google can handle queries in are reported.