Abstract
Many researchers have been working on advanced search techniques such as personalization, query reformulation, and collaborative filtering to enhance the quality of the search results. One common motivation addressed in these research works is the ambiguous-query problem. However, few studies have evaluated the ambiguity of query strings. We analyze 15 million queries from MSN search engine logs in this study. Three major questions are addressed: 1) How many people are using the same query string to search? 2) Are they searching for the same thing while using the same query string? 3) Can we distinguish ambiguous and unambiguous query strings?