What is it about?
Users of web search engines are known to mostly focus on the top ranked results of the search engine result page. While many studies support this well known information seeking pattern only few studies concentrate on the question what users are missing by neglecting lower ranked results. To learn more about the relevance distributions in the so-called long tail we conducted a relevance assessment study with the Million Short long-tail web search engine. While we see a clear difference in the content between the head and the tail of the search engine result list we see no statistical significant differences in the binary relevance judgments and weak significant differences when using graded relevance. The tail contains different but still valuable results. We argue that the long tail can be a rich source for the diversification of web search engine result lists but it needs more evaluation to clearly describe the differences.
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This page is a summary of: How Relevant is the Long Tail?, January 2016, Springer Science + Business Media,
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-44564-9_20.
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SearchStudies: Prof. Dr. Dirk Lewandowski
Prof. Dr. Dirk Lewandowski is a professor of information research and information retrieval at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany. He is the editor of Aslib Journal of Information Management (formerly: Aslib Proceedings), a ISI-ranked information science journal.
SearchStudies: Sebastian Sünkler (M.A.)
Sebastian Sünkler ist Wissenschaftlicher Mitarbeiter und Lehrbeauftragter am Department Information an der Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg.
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