Would it surprise you if over 40 percent of the queries entered into search boxes at search engines consist of proper nouns, such as the names of specific people or places or things?

Or that combinations of proper nouns and nouns might make up over 70 percent of most searches?

At least those are a couple of the conclusions from researchers at Yahoo who are trying to find effective ways to better understand the structure of search queries used by searchers.

A study of queries entered into Yahoo’s search engine in August of 2006 took a close look at The Linguistic Structure of English Web-Search Queries (pdf), and tried to get an understanding of the way that people phrase what they are looking for when they search.

The researchers behind the study came up with some interesting information about the queries that people use, and the structure of those queries.

Continue reading Study on the Structure of Search Queries →

When you type a search query term into a search box at Google or Yahoo or Live.com, the search engines might go through their indexes, and try to find the most relevant and important pages in their databases for the word or phrase that you want to find out more about.

But those search engines might try to improve the results that they show to you by trying to understand the intent behind a search rather than just looking for pages that match keywords that you typed as a search query.

Search Engines and Searcher Intent

What do the search engines themselves reveal about the importance of considering the intent behind a search?

Continue reading How Search Engines May Try to Match Searchers’ Intents from Analysis of Search Engine Query Logs →