Strategy in action: analyzing online search behavior bymining search strategies.

ABSTRACTAnalyzing people's Web search behavior has been a significant topic of interest in the Information Retrieval domain and search engine industry over the past decade. Research in this area has focused on improving search and retrieval capabilities leading to high demands and expectations of Web search users. Understanding and analyzing the Web search process when users are performing Web search tasks is a challenging problem due to many reasons such as subjectivity, dynamic nature, difficulty in measurement of success and difficulty in evaluation. I propose to analyze the users' Web search behavior in order to identify the strategies and tactics they use in fulfilling their task. In order to achieve this, I intend to use data mining and machine learning methods with an emphasis on time series analysis given that the user search process can be considered as a sequence of time related events.