Detecting periodic changes in search intentions in a search engine

Information needs expressed by using the same query for a search engine might be totally different, whether on week days or weekends, or during the day or at night. For queries having no temporal changes in search intentions, the same search results ranking may be returned regardless of the time, but for those with temporal changes the ranking must be suitably altered depending on the time of input. To achieve time-dependent search results rankings, we focus on the temporal changes in the search intentions. We present the results obtained by analyzing a commercial search engine log and propose a method of detecting queries showing periodic changes in the search intentions.