Abstract
Web Search, which takes its root in the mature field of information retrieval, evolved tremendously over the last 20 years. The field encountered its first revolution when it started to deal with huge amounts of Web pages. Then, a major step was accomplished when engines started to consider the structure of the Web graph and link analysis became a differentiator in both crawling and ranking. Finally, a more discrete, but not less critical step, was made when search engines started to monitor and mine the numerous (mostly implicit) signals provided by users while interacting with the search engine. We focus here on this third “revolution” of large scale usage data. We detail the different shapes it takes, illustrating its benefits through a review of some winning search features that could not have been possible without it. We also discuss its limitations and how in some cases it even conflicts with some natural users’ aspirations such as personalization and privacy. We conclude by discussing how some of these conflicts can be circumvented by using adequate aggregation principles to create “ad hoc”crowds.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Agarwal, D., Chen, B.C., Elango, P.: Explore/Exploit Schemes for Web Content Optimization. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Ninth IEEE International Conference on Data Mining, pp. 1–10. IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC (2009)
Baeza-Yates, R., Broder, A., Maarek, Y.: The New Frontier of Web Search Technology: Seven Challenges, ch. 2, pp. 11–23. Springer (2011)
Baeza-Yates, R., Maarek, Y.: Web retrieval. In: Baeza-Yates, R., Ribeiro-Neto, B. (eds.) Modern Information Retrieval: The Concepts and Technology behind Search, 2nd edn. Addison-Wesley (2011)
Baeza-Yates, R., Saint-Jean, F.: A Three Level Search Engine Index Based in Query Log Distribution. In: Nascimento, M.A., de Moura, E.S., Oliveira, A.L. (eds.) SPIRE 2003. LNCS, vol. 2857, pp. 56–65. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Barbaro, M., Zeller Jr., T.: A face is exposed for aol searcher no. 4417749. The New York Times, August 9 (2006)
Bilton, N.: Erasing the digital past. The New York Times (April 2011), http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/03/fashion/03reputation.html
Brenes, D.J., Gayo-Avello, D., Pérez-González, K.: Survey and evaluation of query intent detection methods. In: Proceedings of the 2009 Workshop on Web Search Click Data, WSCD 2009, pp. 1–7. ACM, New York (2009)
Cutrell, E., Guan, Z.: What are you looking for?: an eye-tracking study of information usage in web search. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2007, pp. 407–416. ACM, New York (2007)
Feild, H.A., Allan, J., Jones, R.: Predicting searcher frustration. In: Proceedings of the 33rd International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2010, pp. 34–41. ACM, New York (2010)
Goel, S., Broder, A., Gabrilovich, E., Pang, B.: Anatomy of the long tail: ordinary people with extraordinary tastes. In: Proceedings of the Third ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data Mining, WSDM 2010, pp. 201–210. ACM, New York (2010)
Guo, Q., Agichtein, E.: Exploring mouse movements for inferring query intent. In: Proceedings of the 31st Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2008, pp. 707–708. ACM, New York (2008)
Hamilton, A.: Why cuil is no threat to google. Time.com (Time Magazine Online) (July 2008), http://www.time.com/time/business/article/0,8599,1827331,00.html
Huang, J., White, R.W., Dumais, S.: No clicks, no problem: using cursor movements to understand and improve search. In: Proceedings of the 2011 Annual Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2011, pp. 1225–1234. ACM, New York (2011)
Kadouch, D.: Local flavor for google suggest. The Official Google Blog (March 2009), http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2009/03/local-flavor-for-google-suggest.html
Kukich, K.: Techniques for automatically corecting words in text. ACM Computing Surveys 24(4) (December 1992)
Mullin, J.: FTC commissioner: If companies don’t protect privacy, we’ll go to congress. paidContent.org, the Economics of Digital Content (February 2011)
Pariser, E.: The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You. Penguin Press (2011)
Radlinski, F., Dumais, S.: Improving personalized web search using result diversification. In: Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2006, pp. 691–692. ACM, New York (2006)
Shi, X.: Social network analysis of web search engine query logs. Technical report, School of Information, University of Michigan (2007)
Srikant, R., Basu, S., Wang, N., Pregibon, D.: User browsing models: relevance versus examination. In: Proceedings of the 16th ACM SIGKDD International Conference on Knowledge Discovery and Data Mining, KDD 2010, pp. 223–232. ACM, New York (2010)
Srivastava, J., Cooley, R., Deshpande, M., Tan, P.-N.: Web usage mining: discovery and applications of usage patterns from web data. SIGKDD Explor. Newsl. 1, 12–23 (2000)
Surowiecki, J.: The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the Many Are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economies, Societies and Nations. Random House (2004)
Sweeney, L.: k-anonymity: a model for protecting privacy. International Journal on Uncertainty, Fuzziness and Knowledge-based Systems 10(5), 557–570 (2001)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Baeza-Yates, R., Maarek, Y. (2012). Usage Data in Web Search: Benefits and Limitations. In: Ailamaki, A., Bowers, S. (eds) Scientific and Statistical Database Management. SSDBM 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7338. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31235-9_33
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31235-9_33
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31234-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31235-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)