Multimedia Web Searching on a Meta-Search Engine

This paper provides preliminary results from a major study of multimedia Web searching by Dogpile meta-search engine users, including queries and session characteristics, and changes or differences in image, video and audio searching. The results are compared with multimedia Web searching studies from 1997 to 2002. Image and sexual queries are dominant in multimedia Web searching. The paper provides important implications for the design of multimedia information retrieval systems.