SA web search query is a query that a user enters into web search engine to satisfy his or her information needs. Web search queries are distinctive in that they are unstructured and often ambiguous; they vary greatly from standard query languages which are governed by strict syntax rules.

Types

• Informational queries - Queries that cover a broad topic (e.g., colorado or trucks) for which there may be thousands of relevant results.
• Navigational queries - Queries that seek a single website or web page of a single entity (e.g., youtube or delta airlines).
• Transactional queries - Queries that reflect the intent of the user to perform a particular action, like purchasing a car or downloading a screen saver.
• Connectivity queries - Queries that report on the connectivity of the indexed web graph (e.g., Which links point to this URL?, and How many pages are indexed from this domain name?).

Structured queries

With search engines that support Boolean operators and parentheses, a technique traditionally used by librarians can be applied. A user who is looking for documents that cover several topics or facets may want to describe each of them by a disjunction of characteristic words, such as vehicles OR cars OR automobiles. A faceted query is a conjunction of such facets; e.g. a query such as (electronic OR computerized OR DRE) AND (voting OR elections OR election OR balloting OR electoral) is likely to find documents about electronic voting even if they omit one of the words "electronic" and "voting", or even both.