What Users See – Structures in Search Engine Results Pages

This paper investigates the composition of search engine results pages. We define what elements the most popular web search engines use on their results pages (e.g., organic results, advertisements, shortcuts) and to which degree they are used for popular vs. rare queries. Therefore, we send 500 queries of both types to the major search engines Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask. We count how often the different elements are used by the individual engines. In total, our study is based on 42,758 elements. Findings include that search engines use quite different approaches to results pages composition and therefore, the user gets to see quite different results sets depending on the search engine and search query used. Organic results still play the major role in the results pages, but different shortcuts are of some importance, too. Regarding the frequency of certain host within the results sets, we find that all search engines show Wikipedia results quite often, while other hosts shown depend on the search engine used. Both Google and Yahoo prefer results from their own offerings (such as YouTube or Yahoo Answers). Since we used the .com interfaces of the search engines, results may not be valid for other country-specific interfaces

Standards der Ergebnispräsentation

This article discusses the presentation of results in web search engines

Mesurer la qualité des moteurs de recherche Web

La qualité des moteurs de recherche est un élément fondamental de l’étude de l’accès à l’information et de certains aspects de la politique de communication. La question de savoir si un moteur européen unique est nécessaire et, si tel était le cas, ce qui différencierait celui-ci de ses concurrents américains, ne peut trouver de réponse qu’à travers l’analyse des moteurs de recherche existants. Notre cadre théorique d’analyse de la qualité d’un moteur de recherche comporte quatre domaines : la qualité de l’index, l’efficacité de la recherche d’information, la qualité des fonctionnalités de recherche et l’utilisabilité du moteur en question. Cette contribution présente une revue de la littérature scientifique et les résultats empiriques des études que nous avons réalisées. Les conclusions montrent, notamment, que de nouveaux paramètres réellement centrés sur l’utilisateur seraient nécessaires à l’évaluation de la qualité des moteurs de recherche.The quality of web search engines is the key to certain questions regarding access to information and to some aspects of communication policy. The question whether or not a unique European search engine is needed, and if so, what should differentiate such an engine from the U.S. competitors, can only be answered by analysing the existing search engines. Our framework of search engine quality consists of four areas: index quality, retrieval effectiveness, quality of the search features, and search engine usability. This article presents a literature review and empirical results from the investigators’ own studies. Findings include that new, real user focused parameters for search engine quality measurement have to be provided

Standards der Ergebnispräsentation

This article discusses the presentation of results in web search engines

Methoden der Erhebung von Nutzerdaten und ihre Anwendung in der Suchmaschinenforschung

This article gives an overview of how to obtain and process usage data from web search engines

Qualitätsmessung bei Suchmaschinen: System- und nutzerbezogene Evaluationsmaße.

Search engines are the most important medium to find content on the web. In the past, several studies were conducted, which examined the quality of search engines. But, this evaluation of the quality so far only include a few and often very one-sided aspects. The quality of a search engine is usually equated with its ability to retrieve relevant results. In this work, we will present a full spectrum of measurable aspects of quality, in order to show that more varied measures are necessary, which do not only evaluate the technology of search engines, but also involve the users of search engines in order to get a more comprehensive view on the quality measurement of search engines

Aufbau von Navigationshilfen durch Analyse von Suchanfragen

Nadine Höchstötter, Karlsruhe, berichtete über den letzten Stand ihrer Forschungen zum Suchverhalten in Suchmaschinen. Anhand von Datensätzen in Lycos lassen sich Muster von Suchanfragen ermitteln, aus denen Trends abgeleitet werden können. Es kann dabei zwischen vier grundsätzlichen Klassen unterschieden werden: „Eintagsfliegen“ treten im Erhebungszeitraum nur einmal auf, „Dauerbrenner“ hingegen während der Erhebungsperiode nahezu in jedem definierten Zeitintervall. Kleinere Ausschläge, bei denen bestimmte Suchbegriffe seltener als 100 Mal nachgefragt wurden, können weggelassen werden, um diese Muster schärfer darzustellen. Das abgeschnittene Volumen entspricht einem weißen Rauschen. Weiterhin sind Events und Impulse interessant. „Events“ treten bei Ereignissen auf, die vorher bekannt und durch einen gleichmäßigen Anstieg mit einem senkrechten Abfall am Tag des Events charakterisiert sind. Bei „Impulsen“ verhält sich das Muster genau andersherum. Eine Kombination der verschiedenen Klassen tritt beispielsweise bei aufkommenden Trends auf, die durch Mund-zu-Mund-Propaganda und zum Teil durch Werbemaßnahmen oder andere öffentlichen Medien verbreitet werden. Weiteres: (Diss. 2007). Untersuchung des Suchverhaltens im Web - Interaktion von Internetnutzern mit Suchmaschinen, ISBN 3-8300-2725-

What users see—Structures in search engine results pages

This is a preprint of an article accepted for publication in Information Sciences 179(2009) This paper investigates the composition of search engine results pages. We define what elements the most popular web search engines use on their results pages (e.g., organic results, advertisements, shortcuts) and to which degree they are used for popular vs. rare queries. Therefore, we send 500 queries of both types to the major search engines Google, Yahoo, Live.com and Ask. We count how often the different elements are used by the individual engines. In total, our study is based on 42,758 elements. Findings include that search engines use quite different approaches to results pages composition and therefore, the user gets to see quite different results sets depending on the search engine and search query used. Organic results still play the major role in the results pages, but different shortcuts are of some importance, too. Regarding the frequency of certain host within the results sets, we find that all search engines show Wikipedia results quite often, while other hosts shown depend on the search engine used. Both Google and Yahoo prefer results from their own offerings (such as YouTube or Yahoo Answers). Since we used the.com interfaces of the search engines, results may not be valid for other country-specific interfaces