Max Wilson recently commented on an article by Zhang et al on time series analysis of search logs.  (Thanks to Daniel for the web link.) This is a topic I’ve been interested in for a while, in particular for finding evidence of exploratory search in the logs.  Max notes that the average session length is just under three interactions, and concludes that this really amounts to a single query/selection interaction. If that’s so, then the average behavior  characterized in the Zhang paper is not in fact exploratory.

I was looking forward to reading the paper, but my excitement was short-lived:

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