Subwebs for specialized search

We describe a method to define and use subwebs, user-defined neighborhoods of the Internet. Subwebs help improve search performance by inducing a topic-specific page relevance bias over a collection of documents. Subwebs may be automatically identified using a simple algorithm we describe, and used to provide highly-relevant topic-specific information retrieval. Using subwebs in a Help and Support topic, we see marked improvements in precision compared to generic search engine results. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Search and Retrieval]: Search Process General Terms Algorithms Keywords information retrieval, customized search, subwebs

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2004
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Raman Chandrasekar, Harr Chen, Simon Corston-Oliver, Eric Brill
• Keywords: Generic Search Engine, Information Retrieval, SIGIR 2004, Topic-specific Information Retrieval