Developing a fuzzy search engine based on fuzzy ontology and semantic search

Abstract

Most of existing search engines retrieve web pages by means of finding exact keywords. Traditional keyword-based search engines suffer several problems. First, synonyms and terms similar to keywords are not taken into consideration to search web pages. Users may need to input several similar keywords individually to complete a search. Second, traditional search engines treat all keywords as the same importance and cannot differentiate the importance of one keyword from that of another. Third, traditional search engines lack an applicable classification mechanism to reduce the search space and improve the search results. In this paper, we develop a fuzzy search engine, called Fuzzy-Go. First, a fuzzy ontology is constructed by using fuzzy logic to capture the similarities of terms in the ontology, which offering appropriate semantic distances between terms to accomplish the semantic search of keywords. The Fuzzy-Go search engine can thus automatically retrieve web pages that contain synonyms or terms similar to keywords. Second, users can input multiple keywords with different degrees of importance based on their needs. The totally satisfactory degree of keywords can be aggregated based on their degrees of importance and degrees of satisfaction. Third, the domain classification of web pages offers users to select the appropriate domain for searching web pages, which excludes web pages in the inappropriate domains to reduce the search space and to improve the search results.