Understanding domain "relevance" in web search
Shanu Sushmita, Hideo Joho, Mounia Lalmas, Joemon M. Jose · 2009
This paper presents results of a study that analyses people’s behavior in accessing different domains (e.g., images, movies, blogs, etc.) in web search. Our results show that the information seeking process of web users involves accessing information from various domains, which suggests the need to provide results from various domains in an aggregated manner. This study also indicates the existence of associations between query categories and domains, which suggests that it is important (and possible) to select domains that are “relevant ” to the query. These diversified information sources are often dealt with in a separated way in search results. In general, users have to switch search domains to access different sources. Recently, there has been a growing interest in finding effective ways to aggregate these information sources in a unified fashion. So-called aggregated search investigated by the like of Yahoo! (Alpha Yahoo!) and Google (Universal Search) are providing search results from several sources in a single result page, where, for example, the results from each source are shown within a panel dedicated to that source. Such an example is shown in Figure 1.