Abstract
Short and common web queries are aptly supported by state-of-the-art search engines but performance and user experience are degraded when web queries are longer and less common. Extending previous solutions that automatically shorten queries, we introduce searchAssist: a novel search interface that provides interactive support for difficult web queries. The query logs and questionnaires from a naturalistic study of 90 web users’ search behaviors show that the usage rate of searchAssist for difficult queries was almost 40%. The results also highlight the importance of term dropping for long queries, and the improvements obtained in topical relevance when our searchers used searchAssist.
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Diriye, A., Kumaran, G., Huang, J. (2012). Interactive Search Support for Difficult Web Queries. In: Baeza-Yates, R., et al. Advances in Information Retrieval. ECIR 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7224. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-28997-2_4
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