Search Session Analysis
Search session analysis studies the whole search episode — the sequence of queries, reformulations, clicks, and pauses a user produces while pursuing a single information need — rather than scoring one query in isolation. Real searching is rarely one shot: users issue a query, scan results, refine their wording, follow links, and try again until they succeed or give up. Building on the transaction-log tradition of Jansen, Spink, and Saracevic and the large-scale web studies of Silverstein and colleagues, session analysis reconstructs these episodes from logs, classifies how queries evolve, measures the effort expended, models the transitions between actions, and assesses whether and how the session succeeded. It is the bridge between single-query laboratory evaluation and the messy, iterative reality of how people actually find information.
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.