Context-sensitive web search

As the Web continues to grow and encompass broader and more diverse sources of information, providing effective search facilities to users becomes an increasingly challenging problem. To help users deal with the deluge of Web-accessible information, we propose a search system which makes use of context to improve search results in a scalable way. By context, we mean any sources of information, in addition to any search query, that provide clues about the user's true information need. For instance, a user's bookmarks and search history can be considered a part of the search context. We consider two types of context-based search. The first type of functionality we consider is similarity search. In this case, as the user is browsing Web pages, URLs for pages similar to the current page are retrieved and displayed in a side panel. No query is explicitly issued; context alone (i.e., the page currently being viewed) is used to provide the user with useful related information. The second type of functionality involves taking search context into account when ranking results to standard search queries. Web search differs from traditional information retrieval tasks in several major ways, making effective context-sensitive Web search challenging. First, scalability is of critical importance. With billions of publicly accessible documents, the Web is much larger than traditional datasets. Similarly, with millions of search queries issued each day, the query load is much higher than for traditional information retrieval systems. Second, there are no guarantees on the quality of Web pages, with Web-authors taking an adversarial, rather than cooperative, approach in attempts to inflate the rankings of their pages. Third, there is a significant amount of metadata embodied in the link structure corresponding to the hyperlinks between Web pages that can be exploited during the retrieval process. In this thesis, we design a search system, using the Stanford WebBase platform, that exploits the link structure of the Web to provide scalable, context-sensitive search.