Analysis of Query Reformulations in a Search Engine of a Local Web Site

This study examines reformulations of queries submitted to a search engine of a university Web site with a focus on (implicitly derived) user satisfaction and the performance of the underlying search engine. Using a search log of a university Web site we examined all reformulations submitted in a 10-week period and studied the relation between the popularity of the reformulation and the performance of the search engine estimated using a number of clickthrough-based measures. Our findings are a step towards building better query recommendation systems and suggest a number of metrics to evaluate query recommendation systems. © 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.