A Study of User Image Search Behavior Based on Log Analysis

Study of user behavior in Web search helps understand users’ search intents and improve the ranking quality of search results. To better understand user’s Web image search behavior in practical environment, we investigate user behavior by analyzing a query log collected in one week from a popular image search engine in China. We focus on individual query analyses, temporal distribution, click-through behavior on the search engine result pages (SERPs), and behaviors on preview pages. Compared to general Web search, image search users usually submit shorter query strings and their selections of query terms are more diverse. We find that there exists a huge difference among users in image search click-through behavior. Users are more likely to do exploratory search compared to that in general Web search. This finding may provide us some insights about users’ behavior in the context of image search. Our findings may also benefit multiple perspectives of image search, such as UI design, effectiveness evaluation, ranking algorithms, and etc.