Query operators shown beneficial for improving search results

Abstract

Search engines allow users to retrieve documents with respect to a given query. These provide advanced search options, such as query operators (e.g., +term, term∧10). Previous work studied how query operators are employed by end-users. In this paper, we study the extent to which using query operators may lead to improved results, regardless of specific users. We hypothesize that the proper use of query operators improves search results. To validate this hypothesis, we present a methodology relying on standard IR test collections. We applied this methodology to TREC-7 and TREC-8 test collections with five IR models implemented in the Terrier search engine. Experiments show that queries enriched with operators give an improvement in effectiveness up to 35.1% over regular queries. This result suggests that end-users would benefit from using operators more often. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.