In a recent study at Penn State, results showed that about 80-percent of online searches are informational in nature, whereas 10-percent are navigational and another 10-percent are transactional. Although millions of people use Web search engines, Penn State researchers show that most queries submitted can be classified into these three categories:

• Informational searching involves looking for a specific fact or topic
• Navigational searching seeks to locate a specific web site
• Transactional searching looks for information related to buying a particular product or service

This research was the first published work of its kind done using actual searching data, with the aim of real-time classification. “Other results have classified comparatively much smaller sets of queries, usually manually,” said Jim Jansen, the professor in charge of the study.

This research aimed to classify queries automatically. Our findings have broad implications for search engines and e-commerce if they can classify the user intent of queries in real time.

The study explains that nearly 70 percent of searchers use search engines as their point of entry on the Web. As such, the major search engines receive millions of queries per day and in response to those queries, present billions of results per week. The researchers asked, “What task, need or goal are these people trying to address with their Web searching?” The answer seemed to be that people are looking for information and entertainment and the majority are searching by topic. But are they finding all types of content?

One of the big challenges for media companies right now is ensuring that their content is both discoverable and consumable across the Internet. Information typically resides within documents, which is why articles and other text-based content do so well in the search economy. Similarly, with videos the core information is inside of the clips; however the only text accessible to the search engines crawlers is in the video titles, which tend to be broadly descriptive rather than specific and informative.

When a user searches CNN.com for “rising gas prices” they want to find any articles and videos that mention the topic—not just the content with their search term in the title. The process to date has relied on editors creating manual text abstracts of videos in order to get them discovered, but this doesn’t scale. Imagine if every document on the web could only be found if someone wrote an abstract! Increasingly large enterprises, especially those in the entertainment business, will need to make sure that all of their audio and video content has a consistent and complete set of meta data to unlock and exploit the types of distribution, syndication, and advertising opportunities that are rapidly emerging on the Web.

The Penn State study and resulting paper “Determining the informational, navigational and transactional intent of Web queries” drive home the importance of SEO—for all content types—and illustrate that the majority of Internet users are searching for topic-specific, newsworthy “infotainment” content. Search engines rely on rich meta data for content discovery, presentation, contextualization, and targeting advertising.

Online video usage has grown tremendously over the past years and is a trend that will continue, with 107.7 million video viewers in 2006 and an estimated 150 million by 2010 (eMarketer, February 2007). This growth has created a unique opportunity for media companies and other infotainment sites to leverage their vast amount of online multimedia assets; content producers will only realize this opportunity when they successfully optimize all content forms and connect this content to the search engines and in turn, to consumers.