It is often regarded that the requirement behind a search query is to gather information, therefore classification of web queries can separated into 3 segmented classes:

The Navigation class is defined as the purpose to reach a site required.

The Information class is defined as the requirement to obtain information on the sites many web pages.

The Transaction class is defined as the intention to perform an activity guided by the site.

Navigation class queries – where a user performs a search for the purpose of reaching a site they have visited before or intend to reach a site that they assume to exist. Examples of these queries include:

Searoad Ferries. Intent to reach ‘http://www.searoad.com.au’

AMF bowling. Intent to reach ‘http://www.amfbowling.com.au’

Frank Oneil. Intent to reach ‘http://svpartners.com.au/our-people/frank-oneill/’

These search queries in information retrieval are also called keywords and is mostly used to evaluate results returned. The Text Retrieval Conference concluded that based on 150 queries against the WT10g collection distributed by CSIRO, these search queries are formally known as navigation class queries.

Information class queries – where a user performs a search to find information they assume will be on the internet in a non-variable format.  This means the expectation is to find a readable document that is static and requires no other user interaction, although dynamic pages are becoming more paramount to recent generation of search engines. Furthermore, information class queries can bring up a wider scale of results, for example boats or New York.

Transaction class queries – where a user performs a search and expects to reach a website that requires further interaction.  The interaction involved makes up the transaction defined in the class queries.  Examples consist of shopping, file sharing, finding database heavy services; results are generally difficult to evaluate, for instance a search query for interstate removalists Hobart will attempt to return results based on whether it is appropriate or not, other factors important to users such as price of products and efficiency of service are unavailable until a degree of interaction is performed.