Toward a deeper understanding of user intent and query expressiveness

Understanding the intents of the search users have recently been a popular research topic among Information Retrieval community. Accurate inference of the intent is a major goal of today’s search engines. Ranking the relevant Web documents, targeting better advertisements, assisting the user with better suggested queries are just a few applications where understanding the intent plays a key role. In order to better understand how users formulate their intents into queries, we conducted a preliminary experimental study in which users agreed to be recorded during their search activity. Monitoring the user behavior and discussing the process with them at the end of their search activities allows us to gather some fascinating insights about intents.