Analyzing Searching Behavior in Online Shopping Sites based on Product-Specificity of Query Words

Kei Wakabayashi; Genkou Ou; Tetsuji Satoh

doi:10.52731/ijskm.v4.i2.535

Kei Wakabayashi University of Tsukuba http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6898-4833
Genkou Ou University of Tsukuba
Tetsuji Satoh University of Tsukuba

DOI: https://doi.org/10.52731/ijskm.v4.i2.535

Keywords: Searching Behavior, Online Shopping, Information Content, Log Analysis

Abstract

As the internet continues to spread as a crucial element of social infrastructure, more and more people are shopping online. Online sites that formerly dealt with such specific products as books and clothing have expanded to mall-type shopping sites by incorporating various kinds of stores. This transition has made product searches by users more complicated and prolonged. In this paper, we propose a method that analyzes the transition patterns of the product-specificity of queries in a product-searching b ehavior. As a key concept in our proposed method, we adopt the notion of information content, which represents the amount of information contained in a query, to quantitatively define product-specificity. We conducted an experiment on an actual shopping log dataset to confirm the effectiveness of our proposed method. The result demonstrates that the proposed method extracts illuminating behavioral patterns such as “narrowing-down behavior” that keeps adding query words and “expanding behavior” that keeps removing query words to increase the search results.

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