In web search today, a user types a few keywords which are then matched against a large collection of unstructured web pages. This leaves a lot to be desired for when the best answer to a query is contained in structured data stores and/or when the user ...

Keywords: web databases

The question of how to publish an anonymized search log was brought to the forefront by a well-intentioned, but privacy-unaware AOL search log release. Since then a series of ad-hoc techniques have been proposed in the literature, though none are known ...

Keywords: data release, differential privacy, query click graph, search logs

Thousands of users issue keyword queries to the Web search engines to find information on a number of topics. Since the users may have diverse backgrounds and may have different expectations for a given query, some search engines try to personalize their ...

Keywords: Personalized search, Topic-specific rankings, Topical ontology, User preferences, Web search

Large amounts of (often valuable) information are stored in web-accessible text databases. “Metasearchers” provide unified interfaces to query multiple such databases at once. For efficiency, metasearchers rely on succinct statistical summaries ...

Keywords: Metasearching, distributed information retrieval, text database selection

The Web search engines maintain large-scale inverted indexes which are queried thousands of times per second by users eager for information. In order to cope with the vast amounts of query loads, search engines prune their index to keep documents that ...

Keywords: correctness guarantee, inverted index, pruning, web search engines

Search queries applied to extract relevant information from the World Wide Web over a period of time may be denoted as continuous search queries. The improvement of continuous search queries may concern not only the quality of retrieved results but also ...

Keywords: continuous queries, monitoring search, optimal stopping

In this paper, we continue our investigations of "web spam": the injection of artificially-created pages into the web in order to influence the results from search engines, to drive traffic to certain pages for fun or profit. This paper considers some ...

Keywords: data mining, web characterization, web pages, web spam

An ever-increasing amount of valuable information on the Web today is hidden behind search interfaces. This information is collectively called the Hidden Web. In this dissertation, we study how we can effectively collect the data from the Hidden Web ...

Web Directories are repositories of Web pages organized in a hierarchy of topics and sub-topics. In this paper, we present DirectoryRank, a ranking framework that orders the pages within a given topic according to how informative they are about the topic. ...

Keywords: ranking, semantic similarity, web directory

An ever-increasing amount of information on the Web today is available only through search interfaces: the users have to type in a set of keywords in a search form in order to access the pages from certain Web sites. These pages are often referred to ...

Keywords: adaptive algorithm, deep web crawler, hidden web crawling, keyword queries, query selection