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A web query or web search query is a query that a user enters into a
web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
to satisfy their
information needs The term information need is often understood as an individual or group's desire to locate and obtain information to satisfy a conscious or unconscious need. Rarely mentioned in general literature about needs, it is a common term in information sci ...
. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are often plain text and boolean search directives are rarely used. They vary greatly from standard
query language Query languages, data query languages or database query languages (DQL) are computer languages used to make queries in databases and information systems. A well known example is the Structured Query Language (SQL). Types Broadly, query language ...
s, which are governed by strict syntax rules as
command language A command language is a language for job control in computing. It is a domain-specific and interpreted language; common examples of a command language are shell or batch programming languages. These languages can be used directly at the comman ...
s with keyword or positional
parameters A parameter (), generally, is any characteristic that can help in defining or classifying a particular system (meaning an event, project, object, situation, etc.). That is, a parameter is an element of a system that is useful, or critical, when ...
.


Types

There are three broad categories that cover most web search queries: informational, navigational, and transactional. These are also called "do, know, go." Although this model of searching was not theoretically derived, the classification has been empirically validated with actual search engine queries. * Informational queries – Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., ''colorado'' or ''trucks'') for which there may be thousands of relevant results. * Navigational queries – Queries that seek a single website or web page of a single entity (e.g., ''youtube'' or ''delta air lines''). * Transactional queries – Queries that reflect the intent of the user to perform a particular action, like purchasing a car or downloading a screen saver. Search engines often support a fourth type of query that is used far less frequently: * Connectivity queries – Queries that report on the connectivity of the indexed web graph (e.g., Which links point to this URL?, and How many pages are indexed from this
domain name A domain name is a string that identifies a realm of administrative autonomy, authority or control within the Internet. Domain names are often used to identify services provided through the Internet, such as websites, email services and more. As ...
?).


Characteristics

Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult to come by. Nevertheless, research studies started to appear in 1998. A 2001 study, which analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine, showed some interesting characteristics of web searches: * The average length of a query was 2.4 terms. * About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries. * Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page). * Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.g., boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT). * The top four most frequently used terms were '' (empty search), and, of, ''and'' sex. A study of the same Excite query logs revealed that 19% of the queries contained a geographic term (e.g., place names, zip codes, geographic features, etc.). Studies also show that, in addition to short queries (queries with few terms), there are predictable patterns of how users change their queries. A 2005 study of Yahoo's query logs revealed that 33% of the queries from the same users were repeat queries and that in 87% of cases the user would click on the same result. This suggests that many users use repeat queries to revisit or re-find information. This analysis is confirmed by a Bing search engine blog post which stated that about 30% of queries are navigational queries. In addition, research has shown that query term frequency distributions conform to the
power law In statistics, a power law is a functional relationship between two quantities, where a relative change in one quantity results in a proportional relative change in the other quantity, independent of the initial size of those quantities: one q ...
, or ''long tail'' distribution curves. That is, a small portion of the terms observed in a large query log (e.g. > 100 million queries) are used most often, while the remaining terms are used less often individually. This example of the
Pareto principle The Pareto principle states that for many outcomes, roughly 80% of consequences come from 20% of causes (the "vital few"). Other names for this principle are the 80/20 rule, the law of the vital few, or the principle of factor sparsity. Manag ...
(or ''80–20 rule'') allows search engines to employ optimization techniques such as index or database partitioning, caching and pre-fetching. In addition, studies have been conducted into linguistically-oriented attributes that can recognize if a web query is navigational, informational or transactional. A 2011 study found that the average length of queries had grown steadily over time and the average length of non-English language queries had increased more than English ones. Google implemented the
hummingbird Hummingbirds are birds native to the Americas and comprise the Family (biology), biological family Trochilidae. With about 361 species and 113 genus, genera, they occur from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego, but the vast majority of the species are ...
update in August 2013 to handle longer search queries since more searches are conversational (e.g. "where is the nearest coffee shop?").


Structured queries

With search engines that support Boolean operators and parentheses, a technique traditionally used by librarians can be applied. A user who is looking for documents that cover several topics or ''facets'' may want to describe each of them by a
disjunction In logic, disjunction is a logical connective typically notated as \lor and read aloud as "or". For instance, the English language sentence "it is raining or it is snowing" can be represented in logic using the disjunctive formula R \lor ...
of characteristic words, such as vehicles OR cars OR automobiles. A ''faceted query'' is a
conjunction Conjunction may refer to: * Conjunction (grammar), a part of speech * Logical conjunction, a mathematical operator ** Conjunction introduction, a rule of inference of propositional logic * Conjunction (astronomy), in which two astronomical bodies ...
of such facets; e.g. a query such as (electronic OR computerized OR DRE) AND (voting OR elections OR election OR balloting OR electoral) is likely to find documents about electronic voting even if they omit one of the words "electronic" or "voting", or even both.


See also

*
Information retrieval Information retrieval (IR) in computing and information science is the process of obtaining information system resources that are relevant to an information need from a collection of those resources. Searches can be based on full-text or other c ...
*
Web search engine A search engine is a software system designed to carry out web searches. They search the World Wide Web in a systematic way for particular information specified in a textual web search query. The search results are generally presented in a ...
* Web query classification * Taxonomy for search engines * User intent


References

{{Internet search Internet search