Abstract
Abstract In many situations, searching the web is synonymous to information seeking. Currently, web search engines are the most popular vehicle via which people get access to the web. Their popularity is partially due to the intrinsic way that people interact with them, i.e., by typing some keywords to the corresponding input box. Despite their popularity, search engines often fail to satisfy certain information needs, especially when the latter are haze and poorly articulated. In this paper, we focus on the occasions when large-scale web search engines find it difficult to cope with specific information-seeking behaviors and we accordingly introduce a query construction service that is targeted towards the solution of this problem. The proposed service leverages information coming from various DBpedia datasets and provides an intuitive GUI via which searchers determine the semantic orientation of their queries before these are addressed to the underlying search engine. The evaluation of the query construction service justifies the motive of this paper and indicates that it can considerably improve the searchers’ querying ability when search engines fail to provide adequate help.
Highlights
Large-scale web search engines are the obvious choice for accessing the flourishing data that is available on the web
We introduce a query construction service that resides on top of large-scale web search engines and aims at assisting information seekers formulate queries that are expressive of their search intentions
A query construction service suitable for integration with large-scale web search engines is introduced in an attempt to semantically assist web information seekers in specifying precise and useful queries
Summary
Large-scale web search engines are the obvious choice for accessing the flourishing data that is available on the web. Despite the intended simplicity associated with querying the web via a large-scale search engine, there are times when web searchers spend too much time reformulating queries, before being able to satisfy their information needs. We introduce a query construction service that resides on top of large-scale web search engines and aims at assisting information seekers formulate queries that are expressive of their search intentions. As discussed in the paper, the proposed approach is useful in specific information-seeking modes, where web searchers are unable to address accurate and specific queries to large-scale search engines. The motive of this work is to bridge the semantic gap between the initial and the resulting query of a web search session consisting of several interactions between the searcher and the respective web search engine
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