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AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this research is to show that federated content collections are important for providing access to multiple content repositories, including image, video, audio and Web sites. Design/methodology/approach -This paper presents findings from an analysis of differences in users' Web searching patterns as they access various federated content collections. A dataset of 4,056,374 records submitted to the Dogpile.com Web meta-search engine were analysed. An analysis was conducted of search session length, query length, number of results pages viewed, use of systems' assistance and the frequency of repeat queries. Findings -Overall, users entered two to three terms per query and examined only the first pages of results. However, findings include differences in users' access patterns to various content collections. Web, news and audio queries were longer sessions but shorter queries. More users seeking images and videos sought systems assistance. Originality/value -This is a large-scale original study using data from a commercial Web search engine. The paper provides a valuable comparison of different types of search -text v. audio, image, etc.
IntroductionWeb searching is an everyday skill used by many people worldwide. Previous studies show that overall, Web searches are short, and people view few results pages (Spink and Jansen, 2004). Many Web users are now accessing federated content collections via the Web. Federated search, also known as distributed search, is a growing area of information retrieval research (Callan, 2000;Si and Callan, 2005). A federated content collection is a content organising scheme involving multiple repositories of content, instead of a central repository. These individual repositories typically have their own storage, indexing, and retrieval algorithms. Major Web search engines typically offer tabbed interfaces that permit users to search multiple federated content collections, such as Web documents, images, audio, and video files.Si and Callan (2005) identify three key research problems for federated or distributed Web searching development: first, resource description, or, creating information about the contents of each resource; se...