Beyond Single-Page Web Search Results

Given a user keyword query, current Web search engines return a list of individual Web pages ranked by their "goodness" with respect to the query. Thus, the basic unit for search and retrieval is an individual page, even though information on a topic is often spread across multiple pages. This degrades the quality of search results, especially for long or uncorrelated (multitopic) queries (in which individual keywords rarely occur together in the same document), where a single page is unlikely to satisfy the user's information need. We propose a technique that, given a keyword query, on the fly generates new pages, called composed pages, which contain all query keywords. The composed pages are generated by extracting and stitching together relevant pieces from hyperlinked Web pages and retaining links to the original Web pages. To rank the composed pages, we consider both the hyperlink structure of the original pages and the associations between the keywords within each page. Furthermore, we present and experimentally evaluate heuristic algorithms to efficiently generate the top composed pages. The quality of our method is compared to current approaches by using user surveys. Finally, we also show how our techniques can be used to perform query-specific summarization of Web pages.     

Using Local Popularity of Web Resources for Geo-Ranking of Search Engine Results

Search engines retrieve and rank Web pages which are not only relevant to a query but also important or popular for the users. This popularity has been studied by analysis of the links between Web resources. Link-based page ranking models such as PageRank and HITS assign a global weight to each page regardless of its location. This popularity measurement has shown successful on general search engines. However unlike general search engines, location-based search engines should retrieve and rank higher the pages which are more popular locally. The best results for a location-based query are those which are not only relevant to the topic but also popular with or cited by local users. Current ranking models are often less effective for these queries since they are unable to estimate the local popularity. We offer a model for calculating the local popularity of Web resources using back link locations. Our model automatically assigns correct locations to the links and content and uses them to calculate new geo-rank scores for each page. The experiments show more accurate geo-ranking of search engine results when this model is used for processing location-based queries.     

Databases deepen the Web

The Web has become the preferred medium for many database applications, such as e-commerce and digital libraries. These applications store information in huge databases that users access, query, and update through the Web. Database-driven Web sites have their own interfaces and access forms for creating HTML pages on the fly. Web database technologies define the way that these forms can connect to and retrieve data from database servers. The number of database-driven Web sites is increasing exponentially, and each site is creating pages dynamically-pages that are hard for traditional search engines to reach. Such search engines crawl and index static HTML pages; they do not send queries to Web databases. The information hidden inside Web databases is called the "deep Web" in contrast to the "surface Web" that traditional search engines access easily. We expect deep Web search engines and technologies to improve rapidly and to dramatically affect how the Web is used by providing easy access to many more information resources.     

NEWER: A system for NEuro-fuzzy WEb Recommendation

In the era of the Web, there is urgent need for developing systems able to personalize the online experience of Web users on the basis of their needs. Web recommendation is a promising technology that attempts to predict the interests of Web users, by providing them with information and/or services that they need without explicitly asking for them. In this paper we propose NEWER, a usage-based Web recommendation system that exploits the potential of Computational Intelligence techniques to dynamically suggest interesting pages to users according to their preferences. NEWER employs a neuro-fuzzy approach in order to determine categories of users sharing similar interests and to discover a recommendation model as a set of fuzzy rules expressing the associations between user categories and relevances of pages. The discovered model is used by a online recommendation module to determine the list of links judged relevant for users. The results obtained on both synthetic and real-world data show that NEWER is effective for recommendation, leading to a quality of the generated recommendations comparable and often significantly better than those of other approaches employed for the comparison.     

THESUS, a closer view on Web content management enhanced with link semantics

With the unstoppable growth of the world wide Web, the great success of Web search engines, such as Google and AltaVista, users now turn to the Web whenever looking for information. However, many users are neophytes when it comes to computer science, yet they are often specialists of a certain domain. These users would like to add more semantics to guide their search through world wide Web material, whereas currently most search features are based on raw lexical content. We show how the use of the incoming links of a page can be used efficiently to classify a page in a concise manner. This enhances the browsing and querying of Web pages. We focus on the tools needed in order to manage the links and their semantics. We further process these links using a hierarchy of concepts, akin to an ontology, and a thesaurus. This work is demonstrated by an prototype system, called THESUS, that organizes thematic Web documents into semantic clusters. Our contributions are the following: 1) a model and language to exploit link semantics information, 2) the THESUS prototype system, 3) its innovative aspects and algorithms, more specifically, the novel similarity measure between Web documents applied to different clustering schemes (DB-Scan and COBWEB), and 4) a thorough experimental evaluation proving the value of our approach.     

Mining the Web's link structure

The Web is a hypertext body of approximately 300 million pages that continues to grow at roughly a million pages per day. Page variation is more prodigious than the data's raw scale: taken as a whole, the set of Web pages lacks a unifying structure and shows far more authoring style and content variation than that seen in traditional text document collections. This level of complexity makes an “off-the-shelf” database management and information retrieval solution impossible. To date, index based search engines for the Web have been the primary tool by which users search for information. Such engines can build giant indices that let you quickly retrieve the set of all Web pages containing a given word or string. Experienced users can make effective use of such engines for tasks that can be solved by searching for tightly constrained key words and phrases. These search engines are, however, unsuited for a wide range of equally important tasks. In particular, a topic of any breadth will typically contain several thousand or million relevant Web pages. How then, from this sea of pages, should a search engine select the correct ones-those of most value to the user? Clever is a search engine that analyzes hyperlinks to uncover two types of pages: authorities, which provide the best source of information on a given topic; and hubs, which provide collections of links to authorities. We outline the thinking that went into Clever's design, report briefly on a study that compared Clever's performance to that of Yahoo and AltaVista, and examine how our system is being extended and updated     

Finding related pages in the World Wide Web

When using traditional search engines, users have to formulate queries to describe their information need. This paper discusses a different approach to Web searching where the input to the search process is not a set of query terms, but instead is the URL of a page, and the output is a set of related Web pages. A related Web page is one that addresses the same topic as the original page. For example, www.washingtonpost.com is a page related to www.nytimes.com, since both are online newspapers.We describe two algorithms to identify related Web pages. These algorithms use only the connectivity information in the Web (i.e., the links between pages) and not the content of pages or usage information. We have implemented both algorithms and measured their runtime performance. To evaluate the effectiveness of our algorithms, we performed a user study comparing our algorithms with Netscape's `What's Related' service (http://home.netscape.com/escapes/related/). Our study showed that the precision at 10 for our two algorithms are 73% better and 51% better than that of Netscape, despite the fact that Netscape uses both content and usage pattern information in addition to connectivity information.     

一种Deep Web爬虫的设计与实现

随着World Wide Web的快速发展,Deep Web中蕴含了越来越多的可供访问的信息.这些信息可以通过网页上的表单来获取,它们是由Deep Web后台数据库动态产生的.传统的Web爬虫仅能通过跟踪超链接检索普通的Surface Web页面,由于没有直接指向Deep Web页面的静态链接,所以当前大多数搜索引擎不能发现和索引这些页面.然而,与Surface Web相比,Deep Web中所包含的信息的质量更高,对我们更有价值.本文提出了一种利用HtmlUnit框架设计Deep Web爬虫的方法.它能够集成多个领域站点,通过分析查询表单从后台数据库中检索相关信息.实验结果表明此方法是有效的.     

Search personalization through query and page topical analysis

Thousands of users issue keyword queries to the Web search engines to find information on a number of topics. Since the users may have diverse backgrounds and may have different expectations for a given query, some search engines try to personalize their results to better match the overall interests of an individual user. This task involves two great challenges. First the search engines need to be able to effectively identify the user interests and build a profile for every individual user. Second, once such a profile is available, the search engines need to rank the results in a way that matches the interests of a given user. In this article, we present our work towards a personalized Web search engine and we discuss how we addressed each of these challenges. Since users are typically not willing to provide information on their personal preferences, for the first challenge, we attempt to determine such preferences by examining the click history of each user. In particular, we leverage a topical ontology for estimating a user’s topic preferences based on her past searches, i.e. previously issued queries and pages visited for those queries. We then explore the semantic similarity between the user’s current query and the query-matching pages, in order to identify the user’s current topic preference. For the second challenge, we have developed a ranking function that uses the learned past and current topic preferences in order to rank the search results to better match the preferences of a given user. Our experimental evaluation on the Google query-stream of human subjects over a period of 1 month shows that user preferences can be learned accurately through the use of our topical ontology and that our ranking function which takes into account the learned user preferences yields significant improvements in the quality of the search results.     

搜索引擎结果聚类算法研究

随着Web文档数量的剧增,搜索引擎也暴露了许多问题,用户不得不在搜索引擎返回的大量文档摘要列表中查找。而对搜索引擎结果聚类能使用户在更高的主题层次上来查看搜索引擎返回的结果。该文提出了搜索引擎结果聚类的几个重要指标并给出了一个新的基于PAT—tree的搜索引擎结果聚类算法。     

针对小文本的Web数据挖掘技术及其应用

现有搜索引擎技术返回给用户的信息太多太杂,为此提出一种针对小文本的基于近似网页聚类算法的Web文本数据挖掘技术,该技术根据用户的兴趣程度形成词汇库,利用模糊聚类方法获得分词词典组,采用MD5算法去除重复页面,采用近似网页聚类算法对剩余页面聚类,并用马尔可夫Web序列挖掘算法对聚类结果排序,从而提供用户感兴趣的网页簇序列,使用户可以迅速找到感兴趣的页面。实验证明该算法在保证查全率和查准率的基础上大大提高了搜索效率。由于是针对小文本的数据挖掘,所研究的算法时间和空间复杂度都不高,因此有望成为一种实用、有效的信息检索技术。     

Performing Binary-Categorization on Multiple-Record Web Documents Using Information Retrieval Models and Application Ontologies

To retrieve Web documents of interest, most of the Web users rely on Web search engines. All existing search engines provide query facility for users to search for the desired documents using search-engine keywords. However, when a search engine retrieves a long list of Web documents, the user might need to browse through each retrieved document in order to determine which document is of interest. We observe that there are two kinds of problems involved in the retrieval of Web documents: (1) an inappropriate selection of keywords specified by the user; and (2) poor precision in the retrieved Web documents. In solving these problems, we propose an automatic binary-categorization method that is applicable for recognizing multiple-record Web documents of interest, which appear often in advertisement Web pages. Our categorization method uses application ontologies and is based on two information retrieval models, the Vector Space Model (VSM) and the Clustering Model (CM). We analyze and cull Web documents to just those applicable to a particular application ontology. The culling analysis (i) uses CM to find a virtual centroid for the records in a Web document, (ii) computes a vector in a multi-dimensional space for this centroid, and (iii) compares the vector with the predefined ontology vector of the same multi-dimensional space using VSM, which we consider the magnitudes of the vectors, as well as the angle between them. Our experimental results show that we have achieved an average of 90% recall and 97% precision in recognizing Web documents belonged to the same category (i.e., domain of interest). Thus our categorization discards very few documents it should have kept and keeps very few it should have discarded.     

基于MapReduce的微博用户搜索排名算法

在微博搜索领域,单纯依赖于粉丝数量的搜索排名使刷粉行为有了可乘之机,通过将用户看作网页,将用户间的“关注”关系看作网页间的链接关系,使PageRank关于网页等级的基本思想融入到微博用户搜索,并引入一个状态转移矩阵和一个自动迭代的MapReduce工作流将计算过程并行化,进而提出一种基于MapReduce的微博用户搜索排名算法。在Hadoop平台上对该算法进行了实验分析,结果表明,该算法避免了用户排名单纯与其粉丝数量相关,使那些更具“重要性”的用户在搜索结果中的排名获得提升,提高了搜索结果的相关性和质量。     

A Relation-Based Page Rank Algorithm for Semantic Web Search Engines

With the tremendous growth of information available to end users through the Web, search engines come to play ever a more critical role. Nevertheless, because of their general purpose approach, it is always less uncommon that obtained result sets provide a burden of useless pages. Next generation Web architecture, represented by Semantic Web, provides the layered architecture possibly allowing to overcome this limitation. Several search engines have been proposed, which allow to increase information retrieval accuracy by exploiting a key content of Semantic Web resources, that is relations. However, in order to rank results, most of the existing solutions need to work on the whole annotated knowledge base. In this paper we propose a relation-based page rank algorithm to be used in conjunction with Semantic Web search engines that simply relies on information which could be extracted from user query and annotated resource. Relevance is measured as the probability that retrieved resource actually contains those relations whose existence was assumed by the user at the time of query definition.     

基于查询相关性分析的检索结果聚类算法

随着互联网的普及和网页数量的飞速增长,搜索引擎已经成为从网上获取信息的首选工具.然而,目前主流的搜索引擎在响应用户提交的检索请求时,往往以较长的一维列表形式分页展示结果,为了找到自己所需要的信息,用户必须对该结果列表进行耐心的浏览.为了进一步提高用户获取信息的效率和质量,减轻用户的劳动强度,研究者提出了对检索结果进行再挖掘、再组织的问题,聚类就是其中的研究热点之一.本文在分析现有检索结果聚类算法存在的问题的基础上,提出了基于查询相关性分析的标签驱动聚类算法,该算法通过分析短语与查询项的关联程度,提取作为候选簇标签的短语,然后根据这些标签确定网页摘要隶属的候选簇,最后基于对候选簇和标签的评价进行簇筛选和归并,得到聚类结果及每个簇的标签.在相同环境下进行的对比实验表明,所提出的算法优于相关工作,而且需要更少的信息资源支持.     

一种Deep Web爬虫爬行策略

Deep Web包含丰富的、高质量的信息资源,由于没有直接指向Deep Web页面的静态链接,目前大多搜索引擎不能发现这些页 面,只能通过填写表单提交查询获取。为此,提出一种Deep Web爬虫爬行策略。用网页分类器的分层结果指导链接信息提取器提取有前途的链接,将爬行深度限定在3层,从最靠近查询表单中提取链接,且只提取属于这3个层次的链接,从而减少爬虫爬行时间,提高爬虫的准确度,并设计聚焦爬行算法的约束条件。实验结果表明,该策略可以有效地下载Deep Web页面,提高爬行效率。     

Using semantic techniques to access web data

Nowadays, people frequently use different keyword-based web search engines to find the information they need on the web. However, many words are polysemous and, when these words are used to query a search engine, its output usually includes links to web pages referring to their different meanings. Besides, results with different meanings are mixed up, which makes the task of finding the relevant information difficult for the users, especially if the user-intended meanings behind the input keywords are not among the most popular on the web.     

Automated functional testing of online search services

Search services are the main interface through which people discover information on the Internet. A fundamental challenge in testing search services is the lack of oracles. The sheer volume of data on the Internet prohibits testers from verifying the results. Furthermore, it is difficult to objectively assess the ranking quality because different assessors can have very different opinions on the relevance of a Web page to a query. This paper presents a novel method for automatically testing search services without the need of a human oracle. The experimental findings reveal that some commonly used search engines, including Google, Yahoo!, and Live Search, are not as reliable as what most users would expect. For example, they may fail to find pages that exist in their own repositories, or rank pages in a way that is logically inconsistent. Suggestions are made for search service providers to improve their service quality. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

SearchPad: explicit capture of search context to support Web search

Experienced users who query search engines have a complex behavior. They explore many topics in parallel, experiment with query variations, consult multiple search engines, and gather information over many sessions. In the process they need to keep track of search context — namely useful queries and promising result links, which can be hard. We present an extension to search engines called SearchPad that makes it possible to keep track of ‘search context' explicitly. We describe an efficient implementation of this idea deployed on four search engines: AltaVista, Excite, Google and Hotbot. Our design of SearchPad has several desirable properties: (i) portability across all major platforms and browsers; (ii) instant start requiring no code download or special actions on the part of the user; (iii) no server side storage; and (iv) no added client–server communication overhead. An added benefit is that it allows search services to collect valuable relevance information about the results shown to the user. In the context of each query SearchPad can log the actions taken by the user, and in particular record the links that were considered relevant by the user in the context of the query. The service was tested in a multi-platform environment with over 150 users for 4 months and found to be usable and helpful. We discovered that the ability to maintain search context explicitly seems to affect the way people search. Repeat SearchPad users looked at more search results than is typical on the Web, suggesting that availability of search context may partially compensate for non-relevant pages in the ranking.     

Webspam demotion: Low complexity node aggregation methods

Search engines result pages (SERPs) for a specific query are constructed according to several mechanisms. One of them consists in ranking Web pages regarding their importance, regardless of their semantic. Indeed, relevance to a query is not enough to provide high quality results, and popularity is used to arbitrate between equally relevant Web pages. The most well-known algorithm that ranks Web pages according to their popularity is the PageRank.The term Webspam was coined to denotes Web pages created with the only purpose of fooling ranking algorithms such as the PageRank. Indeed, the goal of Webspam is to promote a target page by increasing its rank. It is an important issue for Web search engines to spot and discard Webspam to provide their users with a nonbiased list of results. Webspam techniques are evolving constantly to remain efficient but most of the time they still consist in creating a specific linking architecture around the target page to increase its rank.In this paper we propose to study the effects of node aggregation on the well-known ranking algorithm of Google (the PageRank) in the presence of Webspam. Our node aggregation methods have the purpose to construct clusters of nodes that are considered as a sole node in the PageRank computation. Since the Web graph is way to big to apply classic clustering techniques, we present four lightweight aggregation techniques suitable for its size. Experimental results on the WEBSPAM-UK2007 dataset show the interest of the approach, which is moreover confirmed by statistical evidence.