Computer Sciences Commons^™

From Clickstreams To Searchstreams: Search Network Graph Evidence From A B2b E-Market, Mei Lin, M. F. Lin, Robert J. Kauffman

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Consumers in e-commerce acquire information through search engines, yet to date there has been little empirical study on how users interact with the results produced by search engines. This is analogous to, but different from, the ever-expanding research on clickstreams, where users interact with static web pages. We propose a new network approach to analyzing search engine server log data. We call this searchstream data. We create graph representations based on the web pages that users traverse as they explore the search results that their use of search engines generates. We then analyze the graph-level properties of these search network …