Understanding how people use search engines: a statistical analysis for e-Business

Abstract

In this paper we describe the analysis realised of the users' behaviour of a Spanish portal named BIWE (http://www.biwe.es). This portal offers to his users a high variety of services, although our study was mainly focused in the search services: a Web directory and a search engine. During a period of two weeks (from 3 May 2000 to 18 May 2000) we logged all the accesses realised by the users to the search services. Next, we realised a statistical study focused mainly in four points: the categories visited by the users in the Web directory, the queries asked to the search engine and the Web pages visited afterwards, and finally a special analysis of the users' sessions. Through this study we will be able to answer questions like these: how far will a user browse the categories of the directory?, how many words does a common query include?, how complicated are these queries?, how many searches will a user perform during a session? All these questions (and their answers) will help us to build a profile of a common Web user and to have a better knowledge of how Web users behave, which is fundamental for e-Business.