Understanding and Enhancing Queries

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World-Wide Web searchers are often frustrated by a lack of relevant results, or more often, overwhelmed by a result set that is too large to examine for relevancy. With hundreds of millions of queries performed each day, query logs provide a new source of knowledge for this project to learn how users search, what people are searching for, and provide suggestions to future searchers. The goals of this project are to learn what people search for on the Web; to provide query suggestions for uncertain or inexperienced searchers; and, to offer relevant query terms for search engine optimization of a website. To these ends, the bipartite graph of queries and their results are analyzed to identify useful query-query and document-document relationships; queries are clustered into topics, using the new relationships as well as more traditional sources of information; existing information retrieval techniques are adapted to help identify, organize, and track not simply query popularity, but topic popularity; and, information from query logs is utilized to help find preferred queries that express a similar information need. The broader impacts of this work are two-fold. By exploiting the untapped information present in Web search engine query traces, this project increases the understanding of how people search on the Web and for what they are looking. This knowledge is applied to generate algorithms and tools to support searchers as well as those who want to be found by those searchers. These tools, as well as datasets collected or generated, will be made available to the research community via the project Web site (http://www.cse.lehigh.edu/~brian/nsf/queries-03.html).