Seen from a user’s perspective, this term is related to the notion of “user satisfaction”. The more satisfied that a user is with the search results and the different aspects of searching, the higher is the rating of the search system. Assessing the quality of a Web search system and the results that it produces is notoriously difficult. For search results, criteria for determining the good, the bad, and the ugly include: scope and depth of coverage, authority, currency, accuracy and reliability, motive and purpose, ease of use and design issues, and so forth. Web search systems are used by a heterogeneous user population for a wide variety of tasks: from finding a specific Web document that the user has seen before and can easily describe, to obtaining an overview of an unfamiliar topic, to exhaustively examining a large set of documents on a topic, and more. A search system will prove useful only in a subset of these cases.
Published in Chapter:
Improving the Quality of Web Search
Mohamed Salah Hamdi (University of Qatar, Qatar)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 18
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59904-847-5.ch026
Abstract
Conventional Web search engines return long lists of ranked documents that users are forced to sift through to find relevant documents. The notoriously-low precision of Web search engines coupled with the ranked list presentation make it hard for users to find the information they seek. Developing retrieval techniques that will yield high recall and high precision is desirable. Unfortunately, such techniques would impose additional resource demands on the search engines which are already under severe resource constraints. A more productive approach, however, seems to enhance post-processing of the retrieved set. If such value-adding processes allow the user to easily identify relevant documents from a large retrieved set, queries that produce low precision/high recall results will become more acceptable. We propose improving the quality of Web search by combining meta-search and self-organizing maps. This can help users both in locating interesting documents more easily and in getting an overview of the retrieved document set.