# Foraging patterns in online searches

## TL;DR

This paper models online search behavior as foraging processes, analyzing click logs to reveal differences in search efficiency and strategies, highlighting how improved search engines facilitate more localized, efficient searches.

## Contribution

The study introduces a foraging-based framework to analyze online search patterns and demonstrates how search engine quality influences search strategies and efficiency.

## Key findings

- Newer logs show predominantly local searches on a single page.
- Older logs exhibit a mix of local searches and power-law distributed relocation phases.
- Improved search engines increase search efficiency by promoting local exploration.

## Abstract

Nowadays online searches are undeniably the most common form of information gathering, as witnessed by billions of clicks generated each day on search engines. In this work we describe online searches as foraging processes that take place on the semi-infinite line. Using a variety of quantities like probability distributions and complementary cumulative distribution functions of step-length and waiting time as well as mean square displacements and entropies, we analyze three different click-through logs that contain the detailed information of millions of queries submitted to search engines. Notable differences between the different logs reveal an increased efficiency of the search engines. In the language of foraging, the newer logs indicate that online searches overwhelmingly yield local searches (i.e. on one page of links provided by the search engines), whereas for the older logs the foraging processes are a combination of local searches and relocation phases that are power law distributed. Our investigation of click logs of search engines therefore highlights the presence of intermittent search processes (where phases of local explorations are separated by power law distributed relocation jumps) in online searches. It follows that good search engines enable the users to find the information they are looking for through a local exploration of a single page with search results, whereas for poor search engines users are often forced to do a broader exploration of different pages.