Mining query logs

Web Search Engines (WSEs) have stored in their query logs information about users since they started to operate. This information often serves many purposes. The primary focus of this tutorial is to introduce to the discipline of query log mining.We will show its foundations, by giving a unified view on the literature on query log analysis, and also present in detail the basic algorithms and techniques that could be used to extract useful knowledge from this (potentially) infinite source of information. Finally, we will discuss how the extracted knowledge can be exploited to improve different quality features of a WSE system, mainly its effectiveness and efficiency.