tailieunhanh - Báo cáo khoa học: "Search in the Lost Sense of “Query”: Question Formulation in Web Search Queries and its Temporal Change"

Web search is an information-seeking activity. Often times, this amounts to a user seeking answers to a question. However, queries, which encode user’s information need, are typically not expressed as full-length natural language sentences — in particular, as questions. Rather, they consist of one or more text fragments. As humans become more searchengine-savvy, do natural-language questions still have a role to play in web search? Through a systematic, large-scale study, we find to our surprise that as time goes by, web users are more likely to use questions to express their search intent. . | Search in the Lost Sense of Query Question Formulation in Web Search Queries and its Temporal Changes Bo Pang Ravi Kumar Yahoo Research 701 First Ave Sunnyvale CA 94089 bopang ravikumar @ Abstract Web search is an information-seeking activity. Often times this amounts to a user seeking answers to a question. However queries which encode user s information need are typically not expressed as full-length natural language sentences in particular as questions. Rather they consist of one or more text fragments. As humans become more searchengine-savvy do natural-language questions still have a role to play in web search Through a systematic large-scale study we find to our surprise that as time goes by web users are more likely to use questions to express their search intent. 1 Introduction A web search query is the text users enter into the search box of a search engine to describe their information need. By dictionary definition a query is a question. Indeed a natural way to seek information is to pose questions in a natural-language form how many calories in a banana . Present day web search queries however have largely lost the original semantics of the word query they tend to be fragmented phrases banana calories instead of questions. This could be a result of users learning to express their information need in search-engine-friendly forms shorter queries fetch more results and content words determine relevance. We ask a simple question as users become more familiar with the nuances of web search are question-queries natural-language questions posed as queries gradually disappearing from the 135 search vernacular If true then the need for search engines to understand question-queries is moot. Anecdotal evidence from Google trends suggests it could be the opposite. For specific phrases one can observe how the fraction of query traffic containing the phrase1 changes over time. For instance as shown next the fraction of query traffic containing how to has