What are you searching for? A content analysis of intranet search engine logs

Other conference contribution, 2006

Web search engines have become often-used tools for many ordinary people today and a growing number of researcher are therefore studying how these lay-persons interact with such tools. However, an overwhelming majority of these studies have focused on the public web and not equally much effort has yet been devoted to the use of intranet search engines. This oversight is unfortunate since corporate intranets are where much business-related information today is kept, and to understand and improve the way technology may aid organisational members to find information is thus a worth-while activity. In this paper we report from a longitudinal and comparative transaction log analysis of a large intranet’s search engine covering the period 2000-2004. We conclude that intranet users search for other topics than do users of the public web. Intranet searchers do not use operators to the same extent as Internet searcher, but seem to use a larger mix of languages. Finally, we note that there are information needs that appear to be persistent across time.