This book brings together results from the Web search studies we conducted from 1997 through 2004. The aim of our studies has been twofold: to examine how the public at large searches the Web and to highlight trends in public Web searching. The eight-year period from 1997 to 2004 saw the beginnings and maturity of public Web searching. Commercial Web search engines have come and gone, or endured, through the fall of the dot.com companies. We saw the rise and, in some cases, the demise of several high profile, publicly available Web search engines. The study of the Web search is an exciting and important area of interdisciplinary research. Our book provides a valuable insight into the growth and development of human interaction with Web search engines. In this book, our focus is on the human aspect of the interaction between user and Web search engine. We do not investigate the Web search engines themselves or their constantly changing interfaces, algorithms and features. We focus on exploring the cognitive and user aspects of public Web searching in the aggregate. We use a variety of quantitative and qualitative methods within the overall methodology known as transaction log analysis.

Autorentext

Amanda Spink is Professor and University Chair in Information Science in the Department of Information Science at Loughborough University (UK). She has a B.A. (Australian National University); Graduate Diploma of Librarianship (University of New South Wales); M.B.A. in Information Technology Management (Fordham University), and a Ph.D. in Information Science (Rutgers University). Amanda's research focuses on theoretical and empirical studies of information behavior. The National Science Foundation, the American Library Association, Andrew R. Mellon Foundation, Amazon.com, Vivisimo. Com, Infospace.com, NEC, IBM, Excite.com, AlltheWeb.com, AltaVista.com, FAST, and Lockheed Martin have sponsored her research. Amanda has published over 330 scholarly journal articles, refereed conference papers and book chapters, and 6 books. Many of her journal articles are published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, and the Journal of Documentation. Amanda's research has been published at many conferences including ASIST, IEEE ITCC, CAIS, Internet Computing, ACM SIGIR, and ISIC Conferences. Her other books are Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives, New Directions in Cognitive Information Retrieval, New Directions in Human Information Behavior and Web Search: Public Searching of the Web, also published by Springer, and the Handbook of Research in Web Log Analysis, published by the Idea Group. Amanda was ranked as the 8th Most Highly Cited Author in the Field of Information Retrieval [Ding, Y., Yan, E., Frazho, A., & Caverlee, J. (2009). PageRank for ranking authors in co-citation networks. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 60(11), 2229-2243] and in 2008 had the second highest H-index citation score in her field from 1998 to 2008 [Norris, M. (2008). Ranking Fellow Scholars and Their H-Index: Preliminary Survey Results.Loughborough University, Dept of Information Science Report].

Inhalt
Technological, Social and Organizational Context.- Human Information Behavior and Human Computer Interaction Context.- Research Design.- Search Terms.- Search Queries.- Search Sessions.- E-Commerce Web Searching.- Medical and Health Web Searching.- Sexually-Related Web Searching.- Multimedia Searching.- Key Findings, Trends, Further Research and Conclusions.