Understanding the relationship of information need specificity to search query length

Abstract

When searching, people's information needs flowthrough to expressing an information retrieval request posed to asearch engine. We hypothesise that the degree of specificity of anIR request might correspond to the length of a search query. Ourresults show a strong correlation between decreasing query lengthand increasing broadness or generality of the IR request. We foundan average cross-over point of specificity from broad to narrow of 3words in the query. These results have implications for searchengines in responding to queries of differing lengths.