The impact of modes of mediation on the web retrieval process

Abstract

This paper is concerned with the investigation of mediation between users and Web search engines and the impact of different modes of mediation on the Web search effectiveness. This involves the integration of explicit, implicit and hybrid modes of mediation within a content-based framework, facilitated by the adoption of the Vector Space Model. The work is supported by an experimental evaluation of the impact of different mediation modes on documents retrieval process in terms of recall and precision. The results of the experiments indicate that the mediation framework improves the quality of the retrieval process, and that the difference in the quality of the results is statistically significant. © 2012 Springer-Verlag.