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Concept
Web query
Summary
A web query or web search query is a query that a user enters into a web search engine to satisfy their information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are often plain text and boolean search directives are rarely used. They vary greatly from standard query languages, which are governed by strict syntax rules as command languages with keyword or positional parameters.
There are three broad categories that cover most web search queries: informational, navigational, and transactional. These are also called "do, know, go." Although this model of searching was not theoretically derived, the classification has been empirically validated with actual search engine queries.
Informational queries – Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., colorado or trucks) for which there may be thousands of relevant results.
Navigational queries – Queries that seek a single website or web page of a single entity (e.g., youtube or delta air lines).
Transactional queries – Queries that reflect the intent of the user to perform a particular action, like purchasing a car or downloading a screen saver.
Search engines often support a fourth type of query that is used far less frequently:
Connectivity queries – Queries that report on the connectivity of the indexed web graph (e.g., Which links point to this URL?, and How many pages are indexed from this domain name?).
Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult to come by. Nevertheless, research studies started to appear in 1998. A 2001 study, which analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine, showed some interesting characteristics of web searches:
The average length of a query was 2.4 terms.
About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries.
Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page).
Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.
Official source
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