Improving web search using contextual retrieval
This work addresses the problem of enhancing search relevance and user experience for web search engine users, but appears incremental as it builds on existing contextual retrieval techniques.
The paper tackled the challenge of improving web search by developing a contextual retrieval system that uses personal and shared user profiles to refine queries, and found that users could find information more readily with this system.
Contextual retrieval is a critical technique for today's search engines in terms of facilitating queries and returning relevant information. This paper reports on the development and evaluation of a system designed to tackle some of the challenges associated with contextual information retrieval from the World Wide Web (WWW). The developed system has been designed with a view to capturing both implicit and explicit user data which is used to develop a personal contextual profile. Such profiles can be shared across multiple users to create a shared contextual knowledge base. These are used to refine search queries and improve both the search results for a user as well as their search experience. An empirical study has been undertaken to evaluate the system against a number of hypotheses. In this paper, results related to one are presented that support the claim that users can find information more readily using the contextual search system.