How well does a search engine understand the users' intention? What are the challenges and questions that arise while interpreting the users' intent? These and other related issues are what the first article in this series will touch upon.

User Intention and Search

The majority of search engine users seldom have an idea of how these searches work. The technology by itself, which is usually shrouded in secrecy, provides very little assistance to the user. Of course, here we are not talking about "advanced search" instructions given by search engines like Google. Usually the end user is an easily satisfied person. He/she is in awe of certain technology, has little understanding of what goes on behind searches and is also unaware of all that one can do with the concept of search. While on the one hand this ignorance creates a user whose needs are simple and easily met, on the other hand we also have a very confused user. The ignorance combined with an overload of information and choices that some of the major search engines are now unleashing on the unsuspecting user often leaves him overwhelmed and baffled.

So, although the primary function of a search engine is information retrieval, it also needs to understand what users want when they key in a word or phrase into the search box. The search equation is based on understanding the users' intention and matching that against information that is available.

User Intention Vis-à-vis Recent Search Engine User / Usability Surveys

Recently, two surveys were widely reported in search media, both done from a search engine marketing perspective : Inside the Mind of the Searcher done by Enquiro and Search Engine User Attitudes Survey Results (April-May 2004) done by iProspect. Although these surveys focus mainly on how paid listings hold their own against organic listings in order to gauge the popularity of paid search ads on major search engines, they also offer some insights into how search engines try to understand users' intentions.

Our purpose here being to understand the interplay between search engines and users' intention, we would like to maintain a distinction between usability analysis and analysis of users' intent. It is also important to note here that merely understanding the keywords inputted by the user will not give a complete understanding of the user. The way users interact with the search engines also forms an integral part of understanding the search user as a whole.

Simple vs. Complex Queries

Simple vs complex queries seem to be an old problem with search engines - a problem mostly treated with an " advanced search" page of a search engine. The OneStat report that came out in February this year and which set off discussions in the media, said that users have started using two or more terms while searching.
As the number of search users increase and search engines become the default gateway to reach the web, it is obvious that searchers are not going to restrict themselves to simple queries.

Here is a short comparison between simple vs. complex queries

Simple Queries:	Usually contain single keyword/term; contains no qualifying word; tends to be more generic in nature e.g., "birds" or "resorts"
Complex Queries:	Usually contain two or more keywords/terms; contain qualifying word/s; tend to be more specific in nature e.g., "low carb diet benefits"

Complex Queries and Search Engines

Complex user queries are posing a big challenge to search engines today who have difficulty in understanding and making an intelligent sense of these queries. In this context, there have also been some interesting comments by Udi Manbar, founder of A9. According to a report on his keynote address at the recent www2004 conference, he sees the users depending on one word searches as a huge barrier to advancement of search technologies. It is quite obvious that balancing simplicity and advancement is a tight-rope walk.
It is interesting to note here that the Enquiro report mentioned earlier contained a very relevant piece of information; the search terms becomes more specific as the user is closing in on the purchase of an item. The more specific the item or thing or object the user is searching for, the more complex the queries become.

This brings us to the key issues faced by search engines today: understanding complex queries is pretty hard for a completely automated system. Even though companies like Google are putting huge might behind the "brute force" of computing to understand the users' intent, it still relies ( within the framework of PageRank, of course) on either finding exact matches or breaking the keywords occurrence to understand exactly what the user is saying.

The problem is, since most search engines are just trying to match keywords in the documents, the documents themselves should contain the exact term the users are searching for; otherwise the search engines will quickly breakdown the term in its constituent words and then do a search. We think that just brute force NLP is not going to help in understanding the intent of the users.

Conclusion

Understanding user intent is an interesting challenge and it has two different aspects:

• developing search engine technology that is trying to make sense of users words and phrases
• making users aware of their interactions with search engines.

It will be interesting to watch how search engines ramp up their technology to understand their users better and how searchers equip themselves to cope with the vagaries of the search engines