1 U.S. VERSUS EUROPEAN WEB SEARCHING TRENDS Amanda Spink School of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University 004C Thomas Building, University Park PA 16802 Tel: (814) 865-4454 Fax: (814) 865-5604 E-mail: spink@ist.psu.edu Seda Ozmutlu & Huseyin C. Ozmutlu Department of Industrial Engineering Uludag University Gorukle Kampusu, Bursa, 16059, Turkey Tel: (90-224) 442-8176 Fax: (90-224) 442-8021 E-mail: seda@uludag.edu.tr Bernard J Jansen School of Information Sciences and Technology The Pennsylvania State University E-mail: jjansen@ist.psu.edu * To whom all correspondence should be directed. INTRODUCTION As the Web is becoming a worldwide phenomenon we need to understand what searching trends are emerging across different global regions. Are there regional differences in Web searching? What are the differences between searching by the United States population compared to Europeans? As part of a body of research studying these questions, we have analyzed two data sets culled from more than one million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite Web search engine collected in May 2001 and the FAST Web search engine (All theWeb.com), collected in February 2001. We compare the searching behavior of largely European FAST Web search engine users (mostly German) with Excite Web search engine users who are largely U.S. This comparative study shows differences in Web searching by U.S. and European users. Specifically, the results suggest some differences in the topics searched and searching behaviors. SCOPE OF STUDY Excite (http://www.excite.com) is a major Internet media company offering Web searching and a personalization portal. FAST (htpp://www.fast.no) and (http://www.alltheweb.com) Web search engines. We analyzed a data set from the FAST search engine Web queries submitted on February 6, 2001. The entries are given in the

2 order they arrive. New sessions/users are identified through a user ID and each query is given time stamps in hours, minutes and seconds. Previous studies show that approximately 84% of Excite users were located in the United States (Spink, Bateman & Jansen, 1998). The majority of FAST users are believed by FAST to be from Europe, mostly from Germany. The specifications of the Excite and FAST query dataset are listed in Table 1 Our study is limited to the analysis of user queries, as we had no access to data on the Web sites users��� accessed. While only data from Excite and FAST was examined, we provide a baseline for comparing Web searching trends in the United States and Europe. The data analysis in this study has the following parts: (1) session and query length and structure, (2) mean query and session durations, (3) search terms per query, and (4) terms in queries. The multimedia queries were also sifted from the entire query logs. Each query log record contained three fields: Identification: anonymous code assigned by Web company server to a user machine, Time of Day: in hours, minutes, and seconds, Query: user terms as entered. We analyzed user: Sessions - entire query sequence by a user Queries - one or more entered terms Terms - any string of characters bounded by white space. Table 1. Excite and FAST 2001 data sets. 2001 Data Set Sessions Queries Terms Excite 262,025 1,025,910 1,538,120 FAST 153,297 451,551 1,350,619 RESULTS Are there global regional differences in Web searching? Table 2 compares results from the FAST and Excite query analysis. Table 2. Comparative statistics for FAST and Excite 2001 Web query data sets ��� one million queries per study. Variables 2001 Excite Study (1.2M Queries) 2001 FAST Study (1.2M Queries) Mean Terms Per Query 2.6 2.3 Terms Per Query 1 Term 2 Terms 3+ Terms 26.9% 30.5% 42.6% 25% 36% 39% Mean Queries Per Session 2.3 2.9 Session Size 1 Query 2 Queries 3+ Queries 55.4% 19.3% 25.3% 53% 18.9% 29%