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We study the problem of estimating the total number of searches (volume) of queries in a specific domain, which were submitted to a search engine in a given time period. Our statistical model assumes that the distribution of searches…
Inspired by correlations recently discovered between Google search data and financial markets, we show correlations between Google search data mortality rates. Words with negative connotations may provide for increased mortality rates,…
A new methodology is proposed for comparing Google Scholar (GS) with other citation indexes. It focuses on the coverage and citation impact of sources, indexing speed, and data quality, including the effect of duplicate citation counts. The…
Recent advances of preservation technologies have led to an increasing number of Web archive systems and collections. These collections are valuable to explore the past of the Web, but their value can only be uncovered with effective access…
We study the impact of Stack Overflow code evolution on the stability of prior research findings derived from Stack Overflow data and provide recommendations for future studies. We systematically reviewed papers published between 2005--2023…
Search engines intentionally influence user behavior by picking and ranking the list of results. Users engage with the highest results both because of their prominent placement and because they are typically the most relevant documents.…
If popular online platforms systematically expose their users to partisan and unreliable news, they could potentially contribute to societal issues like rising political polarization. This concern is central to the echo chamber and filter…
As large language models are increasingly deployed in retrieval-augmented generation and agentic systems that accumulate extensive context, understanding how distracting information affects long-context performance becomes critical. Prior…
Search engines have become key media for our scientific, economic, and social activities by enabling people to access information on the Web in spite of its size and complexity. On the down side, search engines bias the traffic of users…
After years of speculation, price discrimination in e-commerce driven by the personal information that users leave (involuntarily) online, has started attracting the attention of privacy researchers, regulators, and the press. In our…
In Web retrieval, there are many cases of competition between authors of Web documents: their incentive is to have their documents highly ranked for queries of interest. As such, the Web is a prominent example of a competitive search…
People search is an important topic in information retrieval. Many previous studies on this topic employed social networks to boost search performance by incorporating either local network features (e.g. the common connections between the…
Existing works have studied the impacts of the order of words within natural text. They usually analyze it by destroying the original order of words to create a scrambled sequence, and then comparing the models' performance between the…
It is well-known that sequences such as the Fibonacci numbers and the factorials satisfy Benford's Law, that is, leading digits in these sequences occur with frequencies given by $P(d)=\log_{10}(1+1/d)$, $d=1,2,\dots,9$. In this paper, we…
Search engines today present results that are often oblivious to abrupt shifts in intent. For example, the query `independence day' usually refers to a US holiday, but the intent of this query abruptly changed during the release of a major…
In October 2019, Nature published a paper [6] describing an experimental work that was performed at Google. The paper claims to demonstrate quantum (computational) supremacy on a 53-qubit quantum computer. Since then we have been involved…
In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…
The use of the internet, and in particular web browsing, offers many potential advantages for educational institutions as students have access to a wide range of information previously not available. However, there are potential negative…
Click-through rate (CTR) is a key signal of relevance for search engine results, both organic and sponsored. CTR of a result has two core components: (a) the probability of examination of a result by a user, and (b) the perceived relevance…
Currently, the quality of a search engine is often determined using so-called topical relevance, i.e., the match between the user intent (expressed as a query) and the content of the document. In this work we want to draw attention to two…