Characteristics of Web Searching
Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult. Nevertheless, a study in 2001 analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine showed some interesting characteristics of web search:
1) The average length of a search query was 2.4 terms.
2) About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries.
3) Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page).
4) Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.g., Boolean operators like AND, OR and NOT).
5) The top three most frequently used te,•s were and, of and sex.
