Automatic Identification Of User Goals In Web Search

Abstract

There has been recent interests in studying the "goal" behind a user's Web query, so that this goal can be used to improve the quality of a search engine's results. Previous studies have mainly focused on using manual query-log investigation to identify Web query goals. In this paper we study <i>whether</i> and <i>how</i> we can automate this goal-identification process. We first present our results from a human subject study that strongly indicate the feasibility of automatic query-goal identification. We then propose two types of features for the goal-identification task: <i>user-click behavior</i> and <i>anchor-link distribution</i>. Our experimental evaluation shows that by combining these features we can correctly identify the goals for 90% of the queries studied.