Gary Price posted about a new academic paper that offers a review of weblog searching. The paper will be presented at the 28th European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR’06) 2006 in April and is titled ‘A Study of Blog Search.’ It was written by Gilad Mishne and Maarten de Rijke from the University of Amsterdam.(13 pages, 287kb, .PDF). Here is the abstract;
We present an analysis of a large blog search engine query log, exploring a number of angles such as query intent, query topics, and user sessions. Our results show that blog searches have different intents than general web searches, suggesting that the primary targets of blog searchers are tracking references to named entities, and locating blogs by theme. In terms of interest areas, blog searchers are, on average, more engaged in technology, entertainment, and politics than web searchers, with a particular interest in current events. The user behavior observed is similar to that in general web search: short sessions with an interest in the first few results only.
Download this paper – via [SearchEngineWatch]