Study of result presentation and interaction for aggregated search

The World Wide Web has always attracted researchers and commercial search engine companies due to the enormous amount of information available on it. "Searching" on web has become an integral part of today's world, and many people rely on it when looking for information. The amount and the diversity of information available on the Web has also increased dramatically. Due to which, the researchers and the search engine companies are making constant efforts in order to make this information accessible to the people effectively. Not only there is an increase in the amount and diversity of information available online, users are now often seeking information on broader topics. Users seeking information on broad topics, gather information from various information sources (e.g, image, video, news, blog, etc). For such information requests, not only web results but results from different document genre and multimedia contents are also becoming relevant. For instance, users' looking for information on "Glasgow" might be interested in web results about Glasgow, Map of Glasgow, Images of Glasgow, News of Glasgow, and so on. Aggregated search aims to provide access to this diverse information in a unified manner by aggregating results from different information sources on a single result page. Hence making information gathering process easier for broad topics. This thesis aims to explore the aggregated search from the users' perspective. The thesis first and foremost focuses on understanding and describing the phenomena related to the users' search process in the context of the aggregated search. The goal is to participate in building theories and in understanding constraints, as well as providing insights into the interface design space. In building this understanding, the thesis focuses on the click-behavior, information need, source relevance, dynamics of search intents. The understanding comes partly from conducting users studies and, from analyzing search engine log data. While the thematic (or topical) relevance of documents is important, this thesis argues that the "source type" (source-orientation) may also be an important dimension in the relevance space for investigating in aggregated search. Therefore, relevance is multi-dimensional (topical and source-orientated) within the context of aggregated search. Results from the study suggest that the effect of the source-orientation was a significant factor in an aggregated search scenario. Hence adds another dimension to the relevance space within the aggregated search scenario. The thesis further presents an effective method which combines rule base and machine learning techniques to identify source-orientation behind a user query. Furthermore, after analyzing log-data from a search engine company and conducting user study experiments, several design issues that may arise with respect to the aggregated search interface are identified. In order to address these issues, suitable design guidelines that can be beneficial from the interface perspective are also suggested. To conclude, aim of this thesis is to explore the emerging aggregated search from users' perspective, since it is a very important for front-end technologies. An additional goal is to provide empirical evidence for influence of aggregated search on users searching behavior, and identify some of the key challenges of aggregated search. During this work several aspects of aggregated search will be uncovered. Furthermore, this thesis will provide a foundations for future research in aggregated search and will highlight the potential research directions

Marketing electronic resources to distance students: A multipronged approach

When students are surveyed regarding their expectations and satisfaction with library services, it is common to receive suggestions for services or guides the library might offer. In many cases these suggested services already exist. This has been shown to be true in surveys of distance students at the University of New England, Armidale, New South Wales, Australia (UNE). Distance students' varying, and often limited, knowledge of what their home institution offers, coupled with low expectations and remoteness from the physical library pose particular challenges for librarians. What is involved in effectively marketing electronic resources to distance students? How can students be made aware of the wealth of resources available? How can they be helped to achieve proficiency in their use? What initiatives result in increased usage? In seeking to answer these questions, this chapter advocates presenting relevant quality resources which are accessible any time/anywhere. It also affirms offering support at the students' point of need. The value of incorporating into the academic curriculum a requirement to utilize electronic resources is highlighted. The final section examines the effectiveness of a range of standalone approaches which may be used to promote resources

Contexts and Contributions: Building the Distributed Library

This report updates and expands on A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services, originally commissioned by the DLF as an internal report in summer 2003, and released to the public later that year. It highlights major developments affecting the ecosystem of scholarly communications and digital libraries since the last survey and provides an analysis of OAI implementation demographics, based on a comparative review of repository registries and cross-archive search services. Secondly, it reviews the state-of-practice for a cohort of digital library aggregation services, grouping them in the context of the problem space to which they most closely adhere. Based in part on responses collected in fall 2005 from an online survey distributed to the original core services, the report investigates the purpose, function and challenges of next-generation aggregation services. On a case-by-case basis, the advances in each service are of interest in isolation from each other, but the report also attempts to situate these services in a larger context and to understand how they fit into a multi-dimensional and interdependent ecosystem supporting the worldwide community of scholars. Finally, the report summarizes the contributions of these services thus far and identifies obstacles requiring further attention to realize the goal of an open, distributed digital library system

Aggregated search: a new information retrieval paradigm

International audienceTraditional search engines return ranked lists of search results. It is up to the user to scroll this list, scan within different documents and assemble information that fulfill his/her information need. Aggregated search represents a new class of approaches where the information is not only retrieved but also assembled. This is the current evolution in Web search, where diverse content (images, videos, ...) and relational content (similar entities, features) are included in search results. In this survey, we propose a simple analysis framework for aggregated search and an overview of existing work. We start with related work in related domains such as federated search, natural language generation and question answering. Then we focus on more recent trends namely cross vertical aggregated search and relational aggregated search which are already present in current Web search

Has the digitalisation of the leisure air travel search industry been enabled by the characteristics of multi-sided platforms (MSPs)?

The air travel industry has been a front-runner in the development and adoption of new technologies in the past half century. The entry of metasearch companies into the leisure air travel search industry has changed the dynamic of consumer search completely. These metasearch companies operate a multi-sided platform in which they provide end users a free service where they can search, compare and analyse all of the flight options available them. This research studies whether the distinctive characteristics of multi-sided platforms (MSPs) have been the key enablers for the leisure air travel search industry to go through digitalisation. The main theoretical basis for this research was built from literature on platform technologies, with a focus on multi-sided platforms, and digitalisation. Based on past literature, a theoretical lens was developed, in order to identify the specific MSP characteristics that would used to analyse the upcoming data. A plan was created to conduct a qualitative study aimed at obtaining personal views and opinions on various themes regarding digitalisation in the leisure air travel search industry. The qualitative data was obtained utilizing both semi-structured interviews, as well as, written questionnaires, and the data received from the research was analysed in order to find similarities and themes regarding the research topics. The key themes that were formed from the qualitative study were all analysed regarding why they were viewed as important factors within the industry and how they had an effect on the way that the industry has gone through its digitalisation. The themes that emerged were technological milestones, seamless communication, customer loyalty programs, knowing your customers, and ownership of data. Each theme was also analysed in connection to the research question, in order to get overall conclusions for the study. Generally, the results from the study reflected well the existing literature on areas such as the benefits of using multi-sided platforms, the utilisation of customer loyalty programs, and the ability to successfully utilise customer data. In addition, the study provided great insight on the importance for a company to know ones customer and having the ability to recognize and adapt to changing customer demands. This study provides a good basis for further research on the topic, which could include a more extensive study from the consumer side, on what they value the most during the search phase of their leisure flights, and how they see the developments within the industry have changed their entire user experience

The Present and Future of Internet Search

Search engines were crucial in the development of the World Wide Web. Web-based information retrieval progressed from simple word matching to sophisticated algorithms for maximizing the relevance of search results. Statistical and graph-based approaches for indexing and ranking pages, natural language processing techniques for improving query results, and intelligent agents for personalizing the search process all show great promise for enhanced performance. The evolution in search technology was accompanied by growing economic pressures on search engine companies. Unable to sustain long-term viability from advertising revenues, many of the original search engines diversified into portals that farm out their search and directory operations. Vertical portals that serve focused user communities also outsource their search services, and even directory providers began to integrate search engine technologies from outside vendors. This article brings order to the chaos resulting from the variety of search tools being offered under various marketing guises. While growing reliance on a small set of search providers is leading to less diversity among search services, users can expect individualized searching experiences that factor in personal information. The convergence of technology and business models also results in more narrowly defined search spaces, which will lessen the quantity of search results while improving their quality

Congenial Web Search : A Conceptual Framework for Personalized, Collaborative, and Social Peer-to-Peer Retrieval

Traditional information retrieval methods fail to address the fact that information consumption and production are social activities. Most Web search engines do not consider the social-cultural environment of users' information needs and the collaboration between users. This dissertation addresses a new search paradigm for Web information retrieval denoted as Congenial Web Search. It emphasizes personalization, collaboration, and socialization methods in order to improve effectiveness. The client-server architecture of Web search engines only allows the consumption of information. A peer-to-peer system architecture has been developed in this research to improve information seeking. Each user is involved in an interactive process to produce meta-information. Based on a personalization strategy on each peer, the user is supported to give explicit feedback for relevant documents. His information need is expressed by a query that is stored in a Peer Search Memory. On one hand, query-document associations are incorporated in a personalized ranking method for repeated information needs. The performance is shown in a known-item retrieval setting. On the other hand, explicit feedback of each user is useful to discover collaborative information needs. A new method for a controlled grouping of query terms, links, and users was developed to maintain Virtual Knowledge Communities. The quality of this grouping represents the effectiveness of grouped terms and links. Both strategies, personalization and collaboration, tackle the problem of a missing socialization among searchers. Finally, a concept for integrated information seeking was developed. This incorporates an integrated representation to improve effectiveness of information retrieval and information filtering. An integrated information retrieval process explores a virtual search network of Peer Search Memories in order to accomplish a reputation-based ranking. In addition, the community structure is considered by an integrated information filtering process. Both concepts have been evaluated and shown to have a better performance than traditional techniques. The methods presented in this dissertation offer the potential towards more transparency, and control of Web search

CHORUS Deliverable 2.1: State of the Art on Multimedia Search Engines

Based on the information provided by European projects and national initiatives related to multimedia search as well as domains experts that participated in the CHORUS Think-thanks and workshops, this document reports on the state of the art related to multimedia content search from, a technical, and socio-economic perspective. The technical perspective includes an up to date view on content based indexing and retrieval technologies, multimedia search in the context of mobile devices and peer-to-peer networks, and an overview of current evaluation and benchmark inititiatives to measure the performance of multimedia search engines. From a socio-economic perspective we inventorize the impact and legal consequences of these technical advances and point out future directions of research

A Meta Search Engine Approach for Organizing Web Search Results using Ranking and Clustering

The web is expanding with each passing day along with technological advancement in search engine. This results in a long list of links to be retrieved for any user query. However it is not possible to verify each link of this returned list. Even the use of page ranking algorithms in searching does not provide the desired results. To address the solution to this problem a new meta search engine is introduced that uses the similarity measurement function to determine the relevancy of web page with the given query and document clustering technique to group the results into different clusters.

Developing the overall marketing strategy for Small Portuguese Hotels in the Spanish market

This study’s purpose was to develop a successful marketing strategy for Small Portuguese Hotels (SPH) in the Spanish market and provide the start-up with recommendations on both tactical and operational level. Various theoretical models have been applied that when used all together, substantiated by an extensive literature framework, fulfil the process of developing a marketing strategy in a successful way which is needed to succeed as a company nowadays. The concluded marketing strategy for SPH has been based on all data gathered throughout the entire study, consisting of both desk and field research. In terms of field research, an online survey was conducted among Spaniards as part of the customer analysis. Besides, an interview has been held with Mrs. Rita Alves Machado as part of the internal analysis and several SPH employees have participated in several questionnaires needed to design the most relevant framework for SPH when qualifying different strategic options to eventually find the best fitting marketing strategy: ‘Before targeting the promising Spanish market, SPH should achieve its short-term goals and improve day-to-day business. Besides, before moving to the Spanish market, SPH needs a complete and clear marketing, sales and social media plan that can straight be implemented and will strongly position SPH in the Spanish market to expand its existing Portuguese customer base.’ The complete and clear marketing, sales and social media plan comprise the recommendations on both tactical and operational level.Este estudo focou-se no desenvolvimento de uma estratégia de marketing sustentável para a Small Portuguese Hotels (SPH) no mercado espanhol e direcionar a start-up tanto a nível estratégico como operacional. Foram aplicados vários modelos teóricos que, utilizados em conjunto, e fundamentados por uma extensa revisão de literatura, completam o desenvolvimento de uma estratégia de marketing bem-sucedida, necessária para o sucesso de qualquer empresa atualmente. A estratégia resultante foi fundamentada pelos dados recolhidos ao longo de todo o estudo, consistindo em pesquisa documental e trabalho de campo. Em termos da pesquisa realizada em trabalho de campo, foi realizado um questionário online a pessoas de nacionalidade espanhola como análise do cliente. Adicionalmente, foi realizada uma entrevista com a Rita Alves Machado no âmbito da análise interna e com todos os colaboradores da SPH, que participaram em vários questionários, necessários para delinear o quadro mais relevante para a empresa no apuramento de diferentes opções estratégicas e, eventualmente, encontrar a melhor estratégia de marketing pretendida: "Antes de se focar no promissor mercado espanhol, a SPH deve alcançar os seus objetivos de curto prazo e de gestão do dia-a-dia. Adicionalmente, antes de entrar no mercado espanhol, a SPH necessita de um plano completo e claro de marketing, vendas e redes sociais que possa ser implementado eficazmente, que posicionará fortemente a SPH no mercado espanhol para expandir a sua base de clientes portugueses existente." O plano integral de marketing, vendas e redes sociais compreende as recomendações tanto a nível estratégico como operacional