Web searching in Chinese: A study of a search engine in Hong Kong

Abstract

The number of non-English resources has been increasing rapidly on the Web. Although many studies have been conducted on the query logs in search engines that are primarily English-based (e.g., Excite and AltaVista), only a few of them have studied the information-seeking behavior on the Web in non-English languages. In this article, we report the analysis of the search-query logs of a search engine that focused on Chinese. Three months of search-query logs of Timway, a search engine based in Hong Kong, were collected and analyzed. Metrics on sessions, queries, search topics, and character usage are reported. N-gram analysis also has been applied to perform character-based analysis. Our analysis suggests that some characteristics identified in the search log, such as search topics and the mean number of queries per sessions, are similar to those in English search engines; however, other characteristics, such as the use of operators in query formulation, are significantly different. The analysis also shows that only a very small number of unique Chinese characters are used in search queries. We believe the findings from this study have provided some insights into further research in non-English Web searching.