Repeat visits to Vivisimo.com: Implications for successive Web searching

Abstract

We investigate the occurrence of Web searchers returning the same information course, in this case the Vivisimo Web search engine. We analyze data from a transaction log spanning a roughly 8‐day period with approximately 1,200,000 records. During this time 40,227 users made repeated daily visits to the search engine, submitting 648,897 queries. Our findings show that repeat users make up about 21% of the user base. These repeat users account for over 45% of all sessions and nearly 60% of all queries submitted. Most repeat users (46%) visited the search engine on two days during the data collection period, but a sizeable percentage (17%) made 5 or more daily visits to Vivisimo. We discuss the implications for successive searching and future research.