Title
MONSTERS AT THE GATE: WHEN SOFTBOTS VISIT WEB SEARCH ENGINES
Abstract
There has been little research investigating how Web agents search for information. We focused on three research questions: (1) How do agents interact with Web search engines? (2). What type of information are Web agents looking for and in what quantity?, and (3) What is the duration and frequency of Web agent interactions The queries examined for this study were submitted to Alta Vista on 8 September 2002, spanning a 24-hour period. Findings include: (1) when agents interact with Web search engines they use simpler queries than those submitted by human searchers, (2) Web agents are searching for a wide variety of information, with 60% of the terms used being unique, and (3) agent - Web search engine interaction is typically over several hours with multiple instances of interaction per second. Implications for Web agents and search engines are discussed.
Year
Venue
Keywords
2003
IC'03: PROCEEDINGS OF THE INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON INTERNET COMPUTING, VOLS 1 AND 2
softbots,agents,Web searching
Field
DocType
Citations 
Web search engine,Web search query,World Wide Web,Metasearch engine,Search engine,Information retrieval,Computer science,Rewrite engine,Search analytics,Web crawler,Spamdexing
Conference
1
PageRank 
References 
Authors
0.35
6
3
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Bernard J. Jansen14753394.06
Amanda Spink210.35
Jan O. Pedersen363011177.07