The demographics of web search

How does the web search behavior of “rich” and “poor” people differ? Do men and women tend to click on different results for the same query? What are some queries almost exclusively issued by African Americans? These are some of the questions we address in this study. Our research combines three data sources: the query log of a major US-based web search engine, profile information provided by 28 million of its users (birth year, gender and ZIP code), and US-census information including detailed demographic information aggregated at the level of ZIP code. Through this combination we can annotate each query with, e.g. the average per-capita income in the ZIP code it originated from. Though conceptually simple, this combination immediately creates a powerful user modeling tool. The main contributions of this work are the following. First, we provide a demographic description of a large sample of search engine users in the US and show that it agrees well with the distribution o...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2010
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Ingmar Weber, Carlos Castillo
• Keywords: Information Management, Search Behavior, SIGIR 2010, Web Search, ZIP Code