Background

May 7, 2008

A First Taxonomy of Search Log Junk

Search logs contain a lot of weird things, and some of them can have a significant effect on search log analysis. Having looked at tens of thousand lines of search log entries, I offer this first attempt at defining some of the weirdest and least useful kinds of log entry, which I call "Search Log Junk". Here are the types of junk that I've seen most frequently: empty queries, repeat queries, robot crawlers, server hacks, search field/guestbook spam, and internal test queries. More...

February - April, 2008: updates to the site suspended due to injury