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 information about books. There are many online digital libraries containing book, author and subject data, which are accessed via internal search services as well as external web sites, such as Google. Although this is a common yet complex 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, unlike 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 different 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 advantages over document-based models.