Identification of factors predicting clickthrough in Web searching using neural network analysis

In this research, we aim to identify factors that significantly affect the clickthrough of Web searchers. Our underlying goal is determine more efficient methods to optimize the clickthrough rate. We devise a clickthrough metric for measuring customer satisfaction of search engine results using the number of links visited, number of queries a user submits, and rank of clicked links. We use a neural network to detect the significant influence of searching characteristics on future user clickthrough. Our results show that high occurrences of query reformulation, lengthy searching duration, longer query length, and the higher ranking of prior clicked links correlate positively with future clickthrough. We provide recommendations for leveraging these findings for improving the performance of search engine retrieval and result ranking, along with implications for search engine marketing

Freedom of information implications of information sharing networks for critical infrastructure protection

Protection of “critical infrastructure” has become a major issue for govern- ments worldwide. Yet in Australia, as in many other countries, including the United States, an estimated 90% of critical infrastructure is privately owned or operated commercially – in other words, critical infrastructure protection is not the exclusive domain of government. As a result, information sharing between government and the private sector has become a vitally important component of effective risk management. However, establishing effective arrangements of this kind between the public and private sector needs to take account of existing regimes of access and public disclosure which relate to government-held documents; in particular, that which is established by freedom of information (FOI) legislation. This article examines the extent to which the current Commonwealth FOI regime is likely to act as an impediment to the private sector operators of critical infrastructure participat- ing in government-operated information sharing arrangements. By examining developments in other jurisdictions, principally the United States, the article considers whether amendments to the current Australian FOI regime are necessary to ensure effective participation, consistent with the underlying object and purpose of FOI.

Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of web queries

In this paper, we define and present a comprehensive classification of user intent for Web searching. The classification consists of three hierarchical levels of informational, navigational, and transactional intent. After deriving attributes of each, we then developed a software application that automatically classified queries using a Web search engine log of over a million and a half 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 results from this manual classification to the results determined by the automated method. This comparison showed that the automatic classification has an accuracy of 74%. Of the remaining 25% of the queries, the user intent is vague or multi-faceted, pointing to the need for probabilistic classification. We discuss how search engines can use knowledge of user intent to provide more targeted and relevant results in Web searching.