Longitudinal analysis of search engine query logs - temporal coverage

Abstract

The internet is growing day-by-day and the usage of web search engines is continuously increasing. Main page of browsers started by internet users is typically the home page of a search engine. To navigate a certain web site, most of the people prefer to type web sites’ name to search engine interface instead of using internet browsers’ address bar. Considering this important role of search engines as the main entry point to the web, we need to understand Web searching trends that are emerging over time. We believe that temporal analysis of returned query results by search engines reveals important insights for the current situation and future directions of web searching. In this thesis, we provide a large-scale analysis of the evolution of query results obtained from a real search engine at two distant points in time, namely, in 2007 and 2010, for a set of 630000 real queries. Our analyses in this work attempt to find answers to several critical questions regarding the evolution of Web search results. We believe that this work, being a large-scale longitudinal analysis of query results, would shed some light on those questions.