Research Paper

Identification and Analysis of Multi-tasking Product Information Search Sessions with Query Logs

  • Xiang Zhou ,
  • Pengyi Zhang & Jun Wang
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  • Department of Information Management, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China

Received date: 2016-03-16

  Revised date: 2016-05-24

  Online published: 2016-08-18

Supported by

This research is supported by the National Science Foundation of China (NSFC) Grant (No. 71373015).

Abstract

Purpose: This research aims to identify product search tasks in online shopping and analyze the characteristics of consumer multi-tasking search sessions.
Design/methodology/approach: The experimental dataset contains 8,949 queries of 582 users from 3,483 search sessions. A sequential comparison of the Jaccard similarity coefficient between two adjacent search queries and hierarchical clustering of queries is used to identify search tasks.
Findings: (1) Users issued a similar number of queries (1.43 to 1.47) with similar lengths (7.3-7.6 characters) per task in mono-tasking and multi-tasking sessions, and (2) Users spent more time on average in sessions with more tasks, but spent less time for each task when the number of tasks increased in a session.
Research limitations: The task identification method that relies only on query terms does not completely reflect the complex nature of consumer shopping behavior.
Practical implications: These results provide an exploratory understanding of the relationships among multiple shopping tasks, and can be useful for product recommendation and shopping task prediction.
Originality/value: The originality of this research is its use of query clustering with online shopping task identification and analysis, and the analysis of product search session characteristics.


http://ir.las.ac.cn/handle/12502/8733

Cite this article

Xiang Zhou , Pengyi Zhang & Jun Wang . Identification and Analysis of Multi-tasking Product Information Search Sessions with Query Logs[J]. Journal of Data and Information Science, 2016 , 1(3) : 79 -94 . DOI: 10.20309/jdis.201621

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