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Information re-retrieval: repeat queries in Yahoo's logs

Published: 23 July 2007 Publication History

Abstract

People often repeat Web searches, both to find new information on topics they have previously explored and to re-find information they have seen in the past. The query associated with a repeat search may differ from the initial query but can nonetheless lead to clicks on the same results. This paper explores repeat search behavior through the analysis of a one-year Web query log of 114 anonymous users and a separate controlled survey of an additional 119 volunteers. Our study demonstrates that as many as 40% of all queries are re-finding queries. Re-finding appears to be an important behavior for search engines to explicitly support, and we explore how this can be done. We demonstrate that changes to search engine results can hinder re-finding, and provide a way to automatically detect repeat searches and predict repeat clicks.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    SIGIR '07: Proceedings of the 30th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
    July 2007
    946 pages
    ISBN:9781595935977
    DOI:10.1145/1277741
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 23 July 2007

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    Author Tags

    1. query log analysis
    2. re-finding
    3. repeat queries
    4. web search

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    SIGIR07
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    SIGIR07: The 30th Annual International SIGIR Conference
    July 23 - 27, 2007
    Amsterdam, The Netherlands

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 792 of 3,983 submissions, 20%

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    • (2023)“Sometimes It’s Like Putting the Track in Front of the Rushing Train”: Having to Be ‘On Call’ for Work Limits the Temporal Flexibility of CrowdworkersACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/363514531:2(1-45)Online publication date: 4-Dec-2023
    • (2023)Enhancing Potential Re-Finding in Personalized Search With Hierarchical Memory NetworksIEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering10.1109/TKDE.2021.312606635:4(3846-3857)Online publication date: 1-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Method of Loci in VR Web Search: Memory Retention Support by Organizing Search Results in a VR RoomAugmented Cognition10.1007/978-3-031-35017-7_24(373-391)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2023
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    • (2022)A Study of Cross-Session Cross-Device Search Within an Academic Digital LibraryProceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531929(384-394)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
    • (2022)Where Do Queries Come From?Proceedings of the 45th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval10.1145/3477495.3531711(2850-2862)Online publication date: 6-Jul-2022
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