What Users Ask a Search Engine
Michael Völske, Pavel Braslavski, Matthias Hagen, Galina Lezina, Benno Stein · 2015
We analyze the question queries submitted to a large commercial web search engine to get insights about what people ask, and to better tailor the search results to the users' needs. Based on a dataset of about one billion question queries submitted during the year 2012, we investigate askers' querying behavior with the support of automatic query categorization. While the importance of question queries is likely to increase, at present they only make up 3-4% of the total search traffic.