Beyond hyperlinks: organizing information footprints in search logs to support effective browsing

While current search engines serve known-item search such as homepage finding very well, they generally cannot support exploratory search effectively. In exploratory search, users do not know their information needs precisely and also often lack the needed knowledge to formulate effective queries, thus querying alone, as supported by the current search engines, is insufficient, and browsing into related information would be very useful. Currently, browsing is mostly done by following hyperlinks embedded on Web pages. In this paper, we propose to leverage search logs to allow a user to browse beyond hyperlinks with a multi-resolution topic map constructed based on search logs. Specifically, we treat search logs as “footprints” left by previous users in the information space and build a multi-resolution topic map to semantically capture and organize them in multiple granularities. Such a topic map can support a user to zoom in, zoom out, and navigate horizontally over the informa...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: CIKM
• Authors: Xuanhui Wang, Bin Tan, Azadeh Shakery, ChengXiang Zhai
• Keywords: CIKM 2009, Current Search Engines, Database, Search Engine, Search Logs