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For this aim, we rely on a combination of web tracking data and survey data collected over a period of 2\u00a0months from users in Germany (<jats:italic>n<\/jats:italic>\u2009=\u2009558) and Switzerland (<jats:italic>n<\/jats:italic>\u2009=\u2009563). We find that web search accounts for 13% of all desktop browsing, with the share being higher in Switzerland than in Germany. In over 50% of cases users clicked on the first search result, with over 97% of all clicks being made on the first page of search outputs. Most users rely on Google when conducting searches, with some differences observed in users\u2019 preferences for other engines across demographic groups. Further, we observe differences in the temporal patterns of web search use between women and men, marking the necessity of disaggregating data by gender in observational studies regarding online information seeking behaviors. Our findings highlight the contextual differences in web search behavior across countries and demographic groups that should be taken into account when examining search behavior and the potential effects of web search result quality on societies and individuals.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.1007\/s42001-023-00208-9","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2023,5,3]],"date-time":"2023-05-03T09:02:54Z","timestamp":1683104574000},"page":"741-756","update-policy":"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1007\/springer_crossmark_policy","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":26,"title":["You are how (and where) you search? Comparative analysis of web search behavior using web tracking data"],"prefix":"10.1007","volume":"6","author":[{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0003-3332-9294","authenticated-orcid":false,"given":"Aleksandra","family":"Urman","sequence":"first","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]},{"given":"Mykola","family":"Makhortykh","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[],"role":[{"vocabulary":"crossref","role":"author"}]}],"member":"297","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2023,5,3]]},"reference":[{"key":"208_CR1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","unstructured":"Agichtein, E., et al. (2006). Improving web search ranking by incorporating user behavior information. In SIGIR \u201906: proceedings of the 29th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval (pp. 19\u201326). ACM. https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1145\/1148170.1148177","DOI":"10.1145\/1148170.1148177"},{"key":"208_CR2","unstructured":"Alexa. (2021). 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