document: Determining the user intent of web search engine queries Determining the user intent of Web searches is a difficult problem due to the sparse data available concerning the searcher . In this paper , we examine a method to determine the user intent underlying Web search engine queries . We qualitatively analyze samples of queries from seven transaction logs from three different Web search engines containing more than five million queries . From this analysis , we identified characteristics of user queries based on three broad classifications of user intent . The classifications of informational , navigational , and transactional represent the type of content destination the searcher desired as expressed by their query . We implemented our classification algorithm and automatically classified a separate Web search engine transaction log of over a million queries submitted by several hundred thousand users . Our findings show that more than 80 % of Web queries are informational in nature , with about 10 % each being navigational and transactional . In order to validate the accuracy of our algorithm , we manually coded 400 queries and compared the classification to the results from our algorithm . This comparison showed that our automatic classification has an accuracy of 74 % . Of the remaining 25 % of the queries , the user intent is generally vague or multi-faceted , pointing to the need to for probabilistic classification . We illustrate how knowledge of searcher intent might be used to enhance future Web search engines .
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