An adaptive meta-search engine considering the user’s field of interest

AbstractExisting meta-search engines return web search results based on the page relevancy to the query, their popularity and content. It is necessary to provide a meta-search engine capable of ranking results considering the user’s field of interest. Social networks can be useful to find the users’ tendencies, favorites, skills, and interests. In this paper we propose MSE, a meta-search engine for document retrieval utilizing social information of the user. In this approach, each user is assumed to have a profile containing his fields of interest. MSE extracts main phrases from the title and short description of receiving results from underlying search engines. Then it clusters the main phrases by a Self-Organizing Map neural network. Generated clusters are then ranked on the basis of the user’s field of interest. We have compared the proposed MSE against two other meta-search engines. The experimental results show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed method

HARVESTING SOCIAL KNOWLEDGE:SOCIAL NETWORKS AND KNOWLEDGE IN TECHNOLOGY-MEDIATED TEAMS

Ph.DDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPH

Social network document ranking

In search engines, ranking algorithms measure the importance and relevance of documents mainly based on the contents and relationships between documents. User attributes are usually not considered in ranking. This user-neutral approach, however, may not meet the diverse interests of users, who may demand different documents even with the same queries. To satisfy this need for more personalized ranking, we propose a ranking framework, Social Network Document Rank (SNDocRank), that considers both document contents and the relationship between a searcher and document owners in a social network. This method combines the traditional tf-idf ranking for document contents with our Multi-level Actor Similarity (MAS) algorithm to measure to what extent document owners and the searcher are structurally similar in a social network. We implemented our ranking method in a simulated video social network based on data extracted from YouTube and tested its effectiveness on video search. The results show that compared with the traditional ranking method like tf-idf, the SNDocRank algorithm returns more relevant documents. More specifically, a searcher can get significantly better results by being in a larger social network, having more friends, and being associated with larger local communities in a social network. Categories and Subject Descriptors H.3.3 [Information Storage and Retrieval]: Information Search and Retrieval – relevance feedbacks, retrieval models, selectio