Title: Web Search Trends 1997-2004

When: Monday, October 11, 2004 12:00 noon

Where: Room 501, IS Building

Who: Dr. Amanda Spink & Dr. Sherry Koshman, Department of Library and Information Sciences

Presentation: Web search engines, such as Alta Vista.com, AlltheWeb.com, Excite.com and Vivisimo.com are essential tools in the quest to locate online information. Our presentation reports research findings that characterize the changes in Web searching that occurred from 1997 to 2004 using transaction log analysis. We report on changes in the human aspects of Web search from 1997 to 2004, including search terms, queries, sessions, search topics, and use of more advanced search features. We will also provide some preliminary results from an analysis of the clustering feature on Vivisimo.com.

Speaker Bios
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Dr. Amanda Spink is Associate Professor at the School of Information Sciences at the University of Pittsburgh. She has a Ph.D. in Information Science (Rutgers University). Dr. Spink's researches human information behavior and interactive information retrieval (IR), including Web studies and information science theory. The National Science Foundation, Andrew R. Mellon Foundation, Alta Vista.com, NEC, IBM, Excite.com, AlltheWeb.com and Lockheed Martin have sponsored her research. Amanda has published over 200 journal articles, conference papers and book chapters, including the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing and Management, IEEE Computer, and IEEE ITCC, ASIST, Internet Computing, and ACM SIGIR Conferences. Her new book Web Search: Public Searching of the Web details human interaction with Web search engines. Dr. Spink also has a BA (Australian National University, MLS (University of New South Wales) and an MBA (Fordham University).

Dr. Sherry Koshman is Visiting Lecturer at the School of Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh. Her Ph.D. (University of Pittsburgh) focused on usability testing of a prototype visualization-based information retrieval system. Dr. Koshman has worked as an information retrieval and software testing consultant for quality assurance and large-scale product implementation projects in industry. She teaches information technology at the School of Information Sciences and her research concentrates on Web-based information retrieval and user interaction with information visualization retrieval systems. Dr. Koshman has published journal articles, conference papers, and technical reports for academia and industry. She acquired a B.A. (University of Saskatchewan) and an MLIS (McGill University).