Search Results

By Roger C. Wei

10/22/2002

LIS 385T: Information Architecture and Design

History of e-Info Searching

1960s Electronically searched info on computer. 1971 End-user search system was introduced. 1985 First commercial CD-ROM appeared. 1991 Emergence of the World Wide Web. 1992 Gopher was fully functional. 1994 Emergence of first Web search engine

(WebCrawler).

What is Search Results

Search results refer to presentation of content that matches the user’s search query (Rosenfeld & Morville, 2002).

Consist of individual hits.

Search Tools on the Web

About 85% of web users surveyed use search engines to find specific information.

Results of a web search depend on the selected search engine.

Searching and Ranking Process

(1) match the search words

(2) process the search syntax

(3) construct a set of documents

(4) assign a weight

(5) use the assigned weights to rank

(6) display the search results

Relevance

An abstract measure of how well a document satisfy the user’s info need.

A subjective notion and difficult to quantify.

Factors of Ranking (1/2)

Popularity of the page Frequency of terms Number of query terms matched Rarity of terms Weighting by field Proximity of terms Word variants

Factors of Ranking (2/2)

Weighting according to the order where the searcher entered terms

Case-sensitivity Analysis of documents in the database Relevance feedback applied to retrieved

records Date

What re-ranking search results areUser

User Interface

Database Selector

Doc Selector

Query Dispatcher

Search Engine

Search Engine

Search Engine

Result Merger

Measure of IR tool Effectiveness

Recall=

the number of retrieved relevant documents

the number of relevant documents Precision=

the number of retrieved relevant documents

the number of retrieved documents

Recall vs. Precision

Recall

Precision

Search Evaluation

Must be examined in pairs. Two Issues:

Not easy to define relevancyDifficult to know the # of relevant doc that

have not been retrieved.

Survey of Existing Engines (1/2)

Major Search Engines: Google, Teoma, AllTheWeb.com (FAST), Yahoo, MSN Search, Lycos, Ask Jeeves, AOL Search, WiseNut, Inktomi, LookSmart, Open Directory, Overture, AltaVista, HotBot, Netscape Search.

News Search Engines: AltaVista News Specialty Search Engines: Ask Jeeves Kids Search Engines: AOL Kids Only

Survey of Existing Engines (2/2)

Metacrawlers: Dogpile, Metacrawler, Cnet Search, Search.com, ProFusion, Mamma, Ixquick.

Multimedia Search Engines: MP3.com. Regional Search Engines: Mosaique. Paid Listings Search Engines: Overture. Search Utilities: Copernic.

Search Results & Info Architecture

-IA, organization info to reach info needs. IA provides more considerations for the

way engines display results. IA indirectly increase user’s satisfaction in

info needs, when IR don’t have a major breakthrough.

Interface Design at the Search results page: Farkas (2002) Display a number indicating the total

number of results. Provide a query form on the results page. Offer some tips on searching if no results. Hits must provide sufficient information.

Interface Design at the Search results page: Van Duyne (2002) Provide relevant summaries Offer clear organization Provide good hyperlinked titles for each hit Use log files to tailor results for the most

common search terms Compensate for common misspellings Provide support for common search tasks

Interface Design at the Search results page: Rosenfeld (2002)

-variables to consider: The level of searching expertise users

have. The type of results users want. The type of information being searched. The amount of information being

searched.

Search Results Interface

Google vs. Hotbot.

References Baeza-Yates, R. & Ribeiro-Neto, B. (1999) Modern Information Retrieval.

Addison-Wesley, Reading, MA, USA. Chowdhury, A. & Soboroff, I. (2002) Automatic Evaluation of World Wide

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Chowdhury G. G. & Chowdhury S. (2001) information sources and searching on the world wide web. Library Association Publishing. London, UK.

Farkas, D. K., & Farkas J. B. (2002) Principles of Web Design. Pearson Education, Inc.

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