Making the Most of a Web Search Session

Abstract

We tackle problems related to Web query formulation: given the set of keywords from a search session, 1) we find a maximum promising Web query, and, 2) we construct a family of promising Web queries covering all keywords. A query is promising if it fulfills user-defined constraints on the number of returned hits. We assume a real-world setting where the user is not given direct access to a search engine's index, i.e., querying is possible only through an interface. The goal to be optimized is the overall number of submitted Web queries. For both problems we develop search strategies based on co-occurrence probabilities. The achieved performance gain is substantial: compared to the uninformed baselines without co-occurrence probabilities the expected savings are up to 50% in the number of submitted queries, index accesses, and runtime.