Capturing community search expertise for personalized web search using snippet-indexes

ABSTRACT

We describe and evaluate an approach to capturing and re-using search expertise within a community of like minded searchers, such as the employees of a company or organisation. Within knowledge based industries, search expertise - the ability to quickly and accurately locate information according to a specific information need - is an important corporate asset and in our approach we attempt to capture this knowledge by mining the title and snippet texts of results that have been selected by community members in response to their queries. Our assumption is that the snippet text of a result must play a role in helping users to judge the initial relevance of that result and that the snippet terms of selected results must contain especially informative terms about the goals and preferences of the searchers. In other words, results are selected because the user recognises certain combinations of terms in their snippets which are related to their information needs. Our approach seeks to build a community-based snippet index that reflects the evolving interests of a group of searchers. This index is then used to re-rank the results returned by some underlying search engine by boosting the ranking of key results that have been frequently selected for similar queries by community members in the past.

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INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
community, personalization, snippet, web search