This ongoing study of Web searching has examined a number of large-scale Excite transaction logs. We reported selected results from three studies of the Excite query corpora. These studies, using large scale log data, can answer some interesting questions about Web searching, but cannot address the results of users' queries or assess the performance of different search engines. The analysis does provide a snapshot for comparison of public Web searching that can help improve Web search engines and services. We conclude from our analysis that most Web queries are short, without much modification, and are simple in structure.
Few queries incorporate advance search techniques, and when they are used many mistakes result.
However, relevance feedback and advanced search features are growing in use. People retrieve a large number of Web sites, but view few result pages and tend not to browse beyond the first or second results pages. Overall, a small number of terms are used with high frequency and many terms are used once. Web queries are very rich in subject diversity and some unique. The subject distribution of Web queries does not seem to map to the distribution of Web sites subject content.