ARE WEB SEARCH QUERIES AN EVOLVING PROTOLANGUAGE?
Rishiraj Saha Roy, Monojit Choudhury, Kalika Bali · The Evolution of Language · 2012
Searching information on the World Wide Web by issuing queries to commercial search engines is one of the most common activities engaged in by almost every Web user. Web search queries have a unique structure, which is more complex than just a bag-of-words, yet simpler than a natural language. This structure has been evolving over the past decade which is an artefact of the way search engines are evolving and aggressively using feedback from past users to serve current and future users better. In this paper, we argue that queries can be considered as an evolving protolanguage from functional, structural and dynamical points of view. Therefore, Web search logs, a perfectly preserved and rich dataset, can probably reveal several interesting facts about the evolution of protolanguage. 1.