Landscape of web search results clustering algorithms

Abstract

Searching for information on the Webhas attracted great attention in many research com-communities. Due to the enormous size of the Web and low precision of user queries, results returned from present web search engines can reach hundreds or even hundreds of thousands documents. Therefore, finding the right information can be difficult if not impossible. One approach that tries to solve this problem is by using clustering techniques for grouping similar document together in order to facilitate presentation of results in more compact form and enable thematic browsing of the results set. Web Search Results clustering is about efficient identification of meaningful, thematic groups of documents in a search result and their concise presentation. This paper is an introduction to the problem of web search results clustering and we have a brief survey of previous work on web search results clustering and existing commercial search engines using this technique, and propose the possibility of future research direction. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.