When do people use query suggestion? A query suggestion log analysis

Query suggestion, which enables the user to revise a query with a single click, has become one of the most fundamental features of Web search engines. However, it has not been clear what circumstances cause the user to turn to query suggestion. In order to investigate when and how the user uses query suggestion, we analyzed three kinds of data sets obtained from a major commercial Web search engine, comprising approximately 126 million unique queries, 876 million query suggestions and 306 million action patterns of users. Our analysis shows that query suggestions are often used (1) when the original query is a rare query, (2) when the original query is a single-term query, (3) when query suggestions are unambiguous, (4) when query suggestions are generalizations or error corrections of the original query, and (5) after the user has clicked on several URLs in the first search result page. Our results suggest that search engines should provide better assistance especially when rare or single-term queries are input, and that they should dynamically provide query suggestions according to the searcher's current state.