Allowing users to weight search terms
Ronald Fagin, Yoelle Maarek · 2000
: We give a principled method for allowing users to assign subjective weights to the importance of search terms, that is, the terms forming a query, in search engines. For example, our method makes it possible for a user to say that she cares twice as much about the first search term as the second search term, and to obtain a ranked list of results that reflects this preference. Our method is based upon a simple formula derived from any existing "unweighted" ranking function. A naive application of the weighting formula would require issuing as many distinct queries as there are search terms, thus damaging the response time of the retrieval. We explain here how to "smoothly" integrate the formula in most search engines, so as not to affect the retrieval performance in terms of response time. Keywords: weighted queries, web search services Most of this research was done while the author was a Research Fellow at the IBM Haifa Research Laboratory. 1 Introduction and Motivation Users ...