Demographic information flows

In advertising and content relevancy prediction it is important to understand whether, over time, information that reaches one demographic group spreads to others. In this paper we analyze the query log of a large U.S. web search engine to determine whether the same queries are performed by different demographic groups at different times, particularly when there are query bursts. We obtain aggregate demographic features from user-provided registration information (gender, birth year, ZIP code), U.S. census data, and election results. Given certain queries, we examine trends (from high to low and vice versa) and changes in the statistical spread of the demographic features of users that issue the queries over time periods that include query bursts. Our analysis shows that for certain types of queries (movies and news) distinct demographic groups perform searches at different times, suggesting that information related to such queries flows between them. Queries of movie titles, for instance, tend to be issued first by young and then by older users, where a sudden jump in age occurs upon the movie's release. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first time this problem has been studied using search query logs.

• Publication year

  2010

• Venue

  International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management

• Publication date

  2010-10-26

• Fields of study

  Computer Science

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1145/1871437.1871662
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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