An investigation on a community's web search variability

Users' past search behaviour provides a rich context that an information retrieval system can use to tailor its search results to suit an individual's or a community's information needs. In this paper, we present an investigation of the variability in search behaviours for the same queries in a close-knit community. By examining web proxy cache logs over a period of nine months, we extracted a set of 135 queries that had been issued by at least ten users. Our analysis indicates that, overall, users clicked on highly ranked and relevant pages, but they tend to click on different sets of pages. Examination of the query reformulation history revealed that users often have different search intents behind the same query. We identify three major causes for the community's interaction behaviour differences: the variance of task, the different intents expressed with the query, and the snippet and characteristics of retrieved documents. Based on our observations, we identify opportunities to improve the design of different search and delivery tools to better support community and individual search experience.