Improving Europeana search experience using query logs

Europeana is a long-term project funded by the European Commission with the goal of making Europe's cultural and scientific heritage accessible to the public. Since 2008, about 1500 institutions have contributed to Europeana, enabling people to explore the digital resources of Europe's museums, libraries and archives. The huge amount of collected multi-lingual multi-media data is made available today through the Europeana portal, a search engine allowing users to explore such content through textual queries. One of the most important techniques for enhancing users search experience in large information spaces, is the exploitation of the knowledge contained in query logs. In this paper we present a characterization of the Europeana query log, showing statistics on common behavioral patterns of the Europeana users. Our analysis highlights some significative differences between the Europeana query log and the historical data collected by general purpose Web Search Engine logs. In particular, we find out that both query and search session distributions show different behaviors. Finally, we use this information for designing a query recommendation technique having the goal of enhancing the functionality of the Europeana portal. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.