Using social annotations for search results clustering

Abstract

Clustering search results helps the user to overview returned results and to focus on the desired clusters. Most of search result clustering methods use title, URL and snippets returned by a search engine as the source of information for creating the clusters. In this paper we propose a new method for search results clustering (SRC) which uses social annotations as the main source of information about web pages. Social annotations are high-level descriptions for web pages and as the experiments show, clustering based on social annotations yields good clusters with informative labels. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.