Exploring web search behavior of Arab internet users

An important factor in performance evaluation of web search engines is the search behavior of users working with these special information retrieval applications. To explore this behavior of Arab internet users, the top searches executed on Google from seventeen Arab countries in the year 2010 were collected and analyzed. Less than the half of search queries were in Arabic letters and 78% of them consisted of one simple term. Other characteristics like search term uniqueness, language distribution and search goals are discussed in this paper.