Lemur Query Log Project

The UMass Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval (CIIR) is launching a study to gather the query logs from users of the Lemur Query Log Toolbar. The goal of this project is to create a database of Web search activity that will be provided to the information retrieval research community to use on current and future information retrieval research projects.

If you are interested in participating, you will need to install the Toolbar on your computer for either Internet Explorer or Firefox web browser, configure it with the URL of the UMass Amherst Center for Intelligent Information Retrieval upload server where the data will be collected, and then upload your log files at least once per week for a period of up to six months.

To be part of the study, agree to participate.

The Lemur toolbar provides a number of privacy settings that the user may enable. These include the generation of a random session id for log uploading that helps to prevent aggregate log data from being tied to a single user, and also the blacklisting (denying access) of specific data, such as phone numbers, names, and addresses. Users who consent to participate will have all privacy settings available to them, and may set them accordingly in the toolbar Preferences. Data will not be collected on individuals who choose not to participate.

The data to be collected will consist of search queries submitted from a web browser to one of the major search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, etc); the contents of the results pages returned by the search engine; actions performed in the browser while viewing the results page, including time spent, mouse hover time, text copy events (selecting text and copying to clipboard), and clicks on individual result entries; the same actions will be recorded for individual result entry pages that are loaded into the browser. The collected data will be stored in a MySQL relational database, hosted by the UMass Amherst CIIR. You will obtain access to the data via request to the CIIR at lemurstudy@ciir.cs.umass.edu. The query log data will complement the Web test collection being developed by the Lemur group at CMU, led by Professor Jamie Callan.

In order for this project to be successful, we need a large number of participants to create a substantial database suitable for evaluation. We would appreciate your participation to create this valuable tool for research evaluation.