Anatomy of a Collaborative Search Engine
Jingyu Sun, Xueli Yu, Ning Zhong · 2011
We present ExpertRec, a collaborative/social Web search engine. With ExpertRec, users share experts’ search histories (search expertise) through a Web browser toolbar or a proxy browser. As compared to a current web search engine, there are two challenges in ExpertRec: one is to supply a right teamwork environment to satisfy users’ collaborative search; other is to identify search expertise through utilizing users’ search histories and so on. Firstly, we implement a Mozilla Firefox toolbar (a Firefox extension), which can integrate with mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo!, et al., to meet users’ teamwork needs. And it allows users to generate high-quality tags, votes, comments over current Web including search histories, personal archival content in local host typically beyond the reach of existing Web 2.0 social tagging system. Then, a CBR (case-based reasoning)-based recommendation engine is designed to build recommendations and its core is a scalable method to identify search expertise based on a hierarchical user profile in order to improve users’ search quality. In addition, a novel recommendation form is adopted through merging recommendations into return-list by a search engine with the help of ExpertRec toolbar. We describe the architecture, user interface, main techniques and algorithms of ExpertRec, and our primary evaluation is introduced.