The query-flow graph: model and applications

Query logs record the queries and the actions of the users of search engines, and as such they contain valuable information about the interests, the preferences, and the behavior of the users, as well as their implicit feedback to search-engine results. Mining the wealth of information available in the query logs has many important applications including querylog analysis, user profiling and personalization, advertising, query recommendation, and more. In this paper we introduce the query-flow graph, a graph representation of the interesting knowledge about latent querying behavior. Intuitively, in the query-flow graph a directed edge from query qi to query qj means that the two queries are likely to be part of the same "search mission". Any path over the query-flow graph may be seen as a searching behavior, whose likelihood is given by the strength of the edges along the path. The query-flow graph is an outcome of query-log mining and, at the same time, a useful tool for it...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2008
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Paolo Boldi, Francesco Bonchi, Carlos Castillo, Debora Donato, Aristides Gionis, Sebastiano Vigna
• Keywords: CIKM 2008, Information Management, Query Log, Query Recommendation, Query-flow Graph