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Most commercial web search engines do not disclose their search logs, so information about what users are searching for on the Web is difficult to come by[2]. Nevertheless, a study in 2001 [3] analyzed the queries from the Excite search engine showed some interesting characteristics of web search:

* The average length of a search query was 2.4 terms.
* About half of the users entered a single query while a little less than a third of users entered three or more unique queries.
* Close to half of the users examined only the first one or two pages of results (10 results per page).
* Less than 5% of users used advanced search features (e.g., Boolean operators like AND, OR, and NOT).
* The top three most frequently used terms were and, of, and sex.

Another study in 2005 of Yahoo's query logs revealed 33% of the queries from the same user were repeat queries and that 87% of the time the user would click on the same result[4]. This suggests that many users use repeat queries to revisit or re-find information.