Improving Web search through collaborative query recommendation
Evelyn Balfe, Barry Smyth · 2004
Abstract. Search engines are the primary means by which people locate information on the Web. Unfortunately most Web users are not information retrieval experts and there is a tendency for Web queries to be ambiguous and under-specified. Query expansion and recom-mendation techniques offer one way to solve the ambiguous query problem in Web search, by automatically identifying and adding new terms to a vague query in order to focus the search. In this paper we describe and evaluate a novel query recommendation technique based on reusing previous search histories. This is achieved by select-ing, ranking, and then recommending previously successful queries to users. Its novelty stems from the way in which queries are scored and ranked using relevance and coverage factors in order to priori-tise those queries that are most likely to be successful in the current search context. We demonstrate that these recommendations can lead to improved search performance based on live-user data. 1