Query Log Analysis
Query log analysis — also called transaction-log analysis — studies the records that search systems automatically keep of what users typed, what they clicked, and when. Rather than asking users what they do or testing systems in the laboratory, it observes millions of real searches as they actually happened. The landmark studies by Jansen, Spink, and Saracevic on the Excite engine and by Silverstein and colleagues on AltaVista revealed a consistent and surprising picture: real web queries are very short, rarely use advanced operators, and users almost never look past the first page of results. By cleaning logs, reconstructing sessions, and tabulating term, query, and session statistics, the method turns raw server records into a behavioral portrait of how people really search.
Source record
Citations copied verbatim from the method’s source record. No claim-level verification is inferred from them.
- Jansen, B. J., Spink, A., & Saracevic, T. (2000). Real life, real users, and real needs: a study and analysis of user queries on the web. Information Processing & Management, 36(2), 207-227. · DOI 10.1016/S0306-4573(99)00056-4
- Silverstein, C., Marais, H., Henzinger, M., & Moricz, M. (1999). Analysis of a very large web search engine query log. ACM SIGIR Forum, 33(1), 6-12. · DOI 10.1145/331403.331405
- Manning, C. D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2008). Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. · ISBN 9780521865715
Curated claims
Claims persisted in the evidence ledger, each with its own assessment.
This view does not invent a claim assessment when the ledger has none.
Related methods
Generated from the method graph and shown as machine-suggested relations — no evidence claim is inferred.