Optimizing Web Search using Spreading Activation on the Clickthrough Data

Abstract. In this paper, we propose a mining algorithm to utilize the user clickthrough data to improve search performance. The algorithm first explores the relationship between queries and Web pages and mine out co-visiting relationship as the virtual link among the Web pages, and then Spreading Activation mechanism is used to perform the query-dependent search. Our approach could overcome the challenges discussed above and the experimental results on a large set of MSN click-through log data show a significant improvement on search performance over the DirectHit algorithm as well as the baseline search engine