Improving Category Specific Web Search by Learning Query Modifications

Authors: Eric J. Glover, Gary W. Flake, Steve Lawrence, William P. Birmingham, Andries Kruger, C. Lee Giles, David M. Pennock

Users looking for documents within specific categories may have a difficult time locating valuable documents using general purpose search engines. We present an automated method for learning query modifications that can dramatically improve precision for locating pages within specified categories using web search engines. We also present a classification procedure that can recognize pages in a specific category with high precision, using textual content, text location, and HTML structure. Evaluation shows that the approach is highly effective for locating personal homepages and calls for papers. These algorithms are used to improve category specific search in the Inquirus 2 search engine.