Exploring video game searches on the web

Abstract

As video games are developing fast, many users issue queries related to video games in a daily fashion. While there were a few attempts to understand their behavior, little is known on how the video game-related searches are done. Digesting and analyzing this search behavior may thus be faced as an important contribution for search engines to provide better results and search services for their users. To overcome this lack of knowledge and to gain more insight into how video game searches are done, we analyze in this paper, a number of game search queries submitted to a general search engine named Parsijoo. The analysis conducted was performed on top of 372,508 game search records extracted from the query logs within 253,516 different search sessions. Different aspects of video game searches are studied, including, their temporal distribution, game version specification, popular game categories, popular game platforms, game search sessions and clicked pages. Overall, the experimental analysis on video game searches shows that the current retrieval methods used by traditional search engines cannot be applied for game searches, thus, different retrieval and search services should be considered for these searches in the future.