U.S. versus European web searching trends

Abstract

As the Web is becoming a worldwide phenomenon we need to understand what searching trends are emerging across different global regions. Are there regional differences in Web searching? What are the differences between searching by the United States population compared to Europeans? As part of a body of research studying these questions, we have analyzed two data sets culled from more than one million queries submitted by more than 200,000 users of the Excite Web search engine collected in May 2001 and the FAST Web search engine (All theWeb.com), collected in February 2001.We compare the searching behavior of largely European FAST Web search engine users (mostly German) with Excite Web search engine users who are largely U.S. This comparative study shows differences in Web searching by U.S. and European users. Specifically, the results suggest some differences in the topics searched and searching behaviors.