real time search user behavior
Real time search is an increasingly important area of information seeking on the Web. In this research, we analyze 1,005,296 user interactions with a real time search engine over a 190 day period. We investigate aggregate usage of the search engine, such as number of users, queries, and terms. We also investigate the structure of queries and terms submitted by these users. The results are compared to Web searching on traditional search engines. Results show that 60\% of the traffic comes from the engine's application program interface, indicating that real time search is heavily leveraged by other applications. Of the queries, 30\% were unique (used only once in the entire dataset). The most frequent query accounted for 0.003\% of the query set. Less than 8\% of the terms were unique. The most frequently used terms accounted for only 0.03\% of the total terms. Concerning search topics, the most used terms dealt with technology, entertainment, and politics, reflecting both the temporal nature of the queries and, perhaps, an early adopter user-based. Sexual queries were quite low, relative to traditional Web search. Searchers of real time content often repeat queries overtime, perhaps indicating long term interest in a topic. We discuss the implications for search engines and information providers as real time content increasingly enters the main stream.
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