Category: One of my favorite works at SIGIR was Information Re-Retrieval: Repeat Queries in Yahoo’s Logs. Teevan, et al., study repeat queries and repeated clicks in Yahoo usage. Search engines are used for site level navigation alot! 30% of queries fall into the strictly navigational category, with 25% same query-same click and 5% near variants of the query, same click. The study also revealed refinding and topical interest activities, with same queries and a greater variability of click.
Greg Linden has called attention to this work as well, but with a focus on personalization. Indeed, the conclusion of Teevan, et al. is that search engines should provide personalized support for revisitation… but is the search engine really the right tool for the job?
The browser maintains this history (referrer, visit frequency) in a much more secure and safe manner than big corporation search engines. Shouldn’t the browser be better capable of supporting this revisitation? It should be possible to be faster, more accurate, and more secure. I’m looking forward to Firefox 3.0’s Fuel library reaching 0.3, hoping that history makes the cut given that bookmark access is in 0.2, in order to further the dabbling I did in this space with mozwho.
It’s important to note that the search engines make a lot of money on these navigational queries. Big brands buy sponsored ads for their company name (example google msn). Solving the revisitation problem at the browser wouldn’t take search engines out of business, but there might be a few less t-shirt giveaways and free tuna at the big G.
During the lag between the conference and the final wordsmithing on this post, reports surfaced of Google testing a query-based bookmarking feature allowing users to program a 1st position result. Science has shown that the math works, there’s little reason to require explicit action by users for the large proportion of internet navigation which is habitual.
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Great post, I’ve been spending a lot of time recently thinking about the difference between searches for research and searches for navigation (revisitation). Have you seen the Safari plugin Inquisitor? It displays both suggested search phrases, but also direct links to the top three Google results, for easy revisitation.
I’ve been thinking about proposing something similar for auto-complete in the location bar. This would maintain a clean distinction between the location bar and the search bar (one takes you directly to a page, the other takes you to search results), and it would allow for streamlined revisitation.
[...] Auto-complete / URL Bar: check out the UI Mockup. Alex hinted this was coming in my latest post on revisitation, but oooh lala! Necessary backend work is approaching completion: title+url matching and unified search. [...]
[...] So 180 days or 20,000 records, whatever comes first, is the current Firefox warranty on support for revisitation. There’s a lot of engineering going on on the data-structure, but there may also be some smarter strategies. Please clue me in if I’m missing existing strategies in my cursory reading of the bugs and docs. [...]
[...] First, 30% of all queries are navigational. However, in many cases, the actual user intent is more specific than simply visit. In reading thousands of end user “help us improve” reports while working at MSN/Live Search, I found that often users had a very specific intent behind their simple navigational query. They would come back to the search page and tell us about — after they failed to find it on the target site. [...]
[...] I’ve written a lot about how pagination affects the user behavior in search, and done much more proprietary investigations thereof. The process of result evaluation is super optimized by the user, though less so than commonly understood given the 30% navigational query percentage. [...]
[...] know that 30% of searches are for revisiting. This is a lot of user experience and one that Firefox3 is addressing compellingly with the Awesome [...]
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