Abstract

To come up with the recommendations to improve the patent & trademark retrieval efficiency, 100,016 patent & trademark search requests by 17,559 unique users over a period of 193 days were analyzed. By analyzing 2,202 multi-query sessions, where one user issuing two or more queries consecutively, we discovered a number of retrieval efficiency improvements clues. The session analysis result also led to suggestions for new system features to help users reformulating queries. The patent & trademark retrieval users were found to be similar to the typical web users in certain aspects especially in issuing short queries. However, we also found that the patent & trademark retrieval users used Boolean operators more than the typical web search users. By analyzing the multi-query sessions, we found that the users had five intentions in reformulating queries such as paraphrasing, specialization, generalization, alternation, and interruption, which were also used by the web search engine users.