ExpertRec: A collaborative Web search engine

Abstract

ExpertRec is a collaborative Web search engine, which is differ from current main search engine and allows users share search histories through a Web browser toolbar or a proxy browser. In addition, it can be taken as a novel social Web search engine and utilize expert's search histories for building recommendations. In this paper, we give an anatomy of ExpertRec and specially introduce its architecture and core techniques. It includes two basic components: a client agent and a back-end server. The former is implemented as a Mozilla Firefox toolbar (a Firefox extension), which can integrate with mainstream search engines like Google, Yahoo!, et al., to meet users' teamwork needs. And it allows users to generate high-quality tags, votes, comments over current Web including search histories, personal archival content in local host typically beyond the reach of existing Web 2.0 social tagging system. The latter is a CBR (case-based reasoning)-based recommendation engine and implemented according to some core techniques, such recommendation rules, a scalable method to identify search expertise based on a hierarchical user profile in order to improve users' search quality, and so on. Finally, we give an evaluation and make conclusions. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.