Provenance based web search

Abstract

During web search, we often end up with untrusted, duplicates and near duplicate search results which dilutes the focus of search query. Factors that may influence the trust of web search results shall be referred to as 'Provenance'. Provenance is basically the information about the history of data. In this paper, we propose a provenance model which uses both content based and trust based factors in identifying trusted search results. The novelty of our idea lies in attempting to construct a provenance matrix which encompasses 6 factors (who, where, when, what, why, how) related to the search results. Inferences performed over the provenance matrix leads to trust score which is then utilized to remove near-duplicates and retrieve trusted search results. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.