Mining a corporate intranet for user segments of information seeking behavior.

Abstract

Our intranets are growing and the constant unstructured adding of documents and information calls for the need of state of the art search tools. Very little studies have been conducted with the focus on information seeking behavior on intranets. More importantly, only a handful of researchers and vendors see the users as a heterogeneous group. Instead, search engines are designed for one group of people, the user. By applying data mining techniques on a week’s log file taken from a search engine of a large corporate intranet an explorative approach was taken to identify user segments in terms of information seeking behavior. Five rather homogenous segments of users were found and described. Some of the commonly used parameters in Transaction Log file Analysis on both Internet and intranet were examined regarding inbound correlation. The characteristics of these segments and the correlation among the parameters can be used as input when designing new and better fitting search tools.