Place value: Word position shifts vital to search dynamics

  • Rishiraj Saha Roy ,
  • Anusha Suresh ,
  • Niloy Ganguly ,
  • Monojit Choudhury

Proceedings of WWW (Companion Volume) |

Published by WWW Conference 2013

With fast changing information needs in today’s world, it is imperative that search engines precisely understand and exploit temporal changes in Web queries. In this work, we look at shifts in preferred positions of segments in queries over an interval of four years. We find that such shifts can predict key changes in usage patterns, and explain the observed increase in query lengths. Our findings indicate that recording positional statistics can be vital for understanding user intent in Web search queries.