On the Network Characteristics of the Google’s Suggest Service

Abstract

This paper investigates application- and transport-level characteristics of Google's interactive Suggest service by analyzing a passively captured packet trace from a campus network. In particular, we study the number of HTTP GET requests involved in user search queries, the inter-request times, the number of HTTP GET requests per TCP connection, the number of keyword suggestions that Google's Suggest service to users, and how often users utilize these suggestions in enhancing their search queries. Our findings indicate, for example, that nearly 40% of Google search queries involve five or more HTTP GET requests. For 36% of these requests, Google returns no suggestions, and 57% of the time users do not utilize returned suggestions. Furthermore, we find that some HTTP characteristics such as inter-request generation time for interactive search application are different from that of traditional Web applications. These results confirm the findings of other studies that examined interactive applications and reported that such applications are more aggressive than traditional Web applications.