Predicting when browsing context is relevant to search

We investigate a representative case of sudden information need change of Web users. By analyzing search engine query logs, we show that the majority of queries submitted by users after browsing documents in the news domain are related to the most recently browsed document. We investigate ways of identifying whether a query is a good candidate for contextualization conditioned on the most recently browsed document by a user. We build a successful classifier for this task, which achieves 96% precision at 90% recall. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval General Terms Algorithms, Experimentation, Measurement Keywords Contextualized Web search, query log analysis, query expansion

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2008
• Where: SIGIR
• Authors: Mandar Rahurkar, Silviu Cucerzan
• Keywords: Document, Information Technology, Representative Case, Retrieval General Terms, SIGIR 2008