Improving mobile web-IR using access concentration sites in search results

Abstract

Effective ranking algorithms for mobile web search are being actively pursued. Due to the peculiar and troublesome properties of mobile contents such as scant text, few outward links, and few input keywords, conventional web search techniques using bag-of-words ranking functions or link-based algorithms are not good enough for mobile web search. Our solution is to use click logs; the aim is to extract only access concentrated search results from among the many search results. Users typically click a search result after seeing its title and snippet, so the titles and snippets of the access concentrated sites must be good relevance feedback sources that will greatly improve mobile web search performance. In this paper, we introduce a new measure that is capable of estimating the degree of access concentration and present a method that uses the measure to precisely extract the access concentration sites from many search results. Query expansion with terms extracted from the access concentration sites is then performed. The effectiveness of our proposal is verified in an experiment that uses click logs and data from a real mobile web search site. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.