Evaluation of user search in a Web-database

The number of Web databases has exploded during the last few years. In order to justify the development of new information resources, it is essential to know if the use of existing resources has followed a similar trend. This paper presents an analysis of the use of a national statistical Web database that was made to support Web-site improvement efforts. The study is based on log data taken during two time periods in 1999 and 2000. In this period, the number of registered users increased five-fold and the number of sessions more than doubled. During September 2000, active users spent 4,320 hours on the Web database and initiated 14,998 topic sessions, giving an average of seven hours and 25 sessions per user. The definition of a "session" has proved difficult, since the log data available is based on registered organizations, rather than on tasks or individual users. Ideally, a "session" should be defined as a search for and retrieval of the information required for a task. We have used a "topic session", defined as a sequence of requests from topic initiation to retrieval of the data on this topic, as a task approximation.