Understanding Book Search Behavior on the Web

With the increased availability of e-books and digitized book collections, more users are searching the web for informa-tion about books. There are many online digital libraries containing book, author and subject data, which are ac-cessed via internal search services as well as external web sites, such as Google. Although this is a common yet com-plex information-seeking behavior involving multiple search systems with different characteristics, little is known about how users find information in this scenario. In this work, we analyze web-based book search behavior using three months of logs from the Open Library, a globally accessible digital library. Our study encompasses the user behavior on web search engines and the digital library, un-like previous work which focused on institution-level digital libraries. Among our findings are (1) query characteristics and session-level behaviors are drastically different between internal and external searchers; (2) the field usage is dif-ferent based on the modes of interaction—keyword search, advanced search interface and faceted filtering; (3) users go through with more iterations of faceted filtering than query reformulation. To facilitate future research on book search, we also create a book search test collection based on the log data. We then perform an evaluation of several retrieval methods, finding that field-based retrieval models have ad-vantages over document-based models