Investigating Query Bursts in a Web Search Engine

The Internet has become for many the most important medium for staying informed about current news events. Some events cause heightened interest on a topic, which in turn yields a higher frequency of the search queries related to it. These queries are going through a “query burst”. In this paper we examine the behavior of search engine users during a query burst, compared to before and after the burst. We are interested in how this behavior changes, and how it affects other stake-holders in web search.

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