JCDL 2007 - day 2

This morning Daniel Russell (Uber Tech Lead for Search Quality & User Happiness at Google) gave a fantastic keynote address entitled What Are They Thinking? Searching for the Mind of the Searcher. Daniel spoke about the great amount of research Google does to figure out how users use Google to search. Here are a just few points of interest from Daniel's talk:

• For North America, the average user performs 9.4 searches a week.
  
• 60% of users perform one Google query or less a day.
• Only 10% of users go to the next page of results.
• Half of all clicks to the Advanced Search page result in the user abandoning their search, most likely because they are overwhelmed by the Advanced Search interface.
• Most users look at 3 results before clicking on a result.
• Many users "teleport"... instead of using Google to make a search (like searching for a flight), they search Google for a website from which they can then make their desired search.
• The more query terms used in a search, the longer amount of time the user will spend examining the search results.
• Most people don't have a clue how Google works, and they don't really care. For example, many individuals Google only examines the first couple of lines of text from a page.
  

After Daniel's talk and a break, I presented my first paper, Factors Affecting Website Reconstruction from the Web Infrastructure. (You can see my slides here). Joan presented after me: Generating Best-Effort Preservation Metadata for Web Resources at Time of Dissemination. Both talks seemed to go really well, and we both got some positive feedback.

This evening I attended the Minute Madness where a representative from each of the demonstrations and posters got a minute to advertise their demo/poster. The poster reception was held immediately afterward, and Marko won top poster again (that punk won top poster last month at WWW07)!

I think the most interesting poster I saw though was Blogger Perceptions on Digital Preservation, a study conducted by UNC. The researchers performed a survey asking bloggers questions like, "What would happen if your blog suddenly disappeared?" Their work coincides with mine- I recently coauthored a paper where we asked individuals who actually lost their websites questions like "How did losing your website affect you?"