Characterizing, Predicting, and Handling Web Search Queries That Match Very Few or No Results

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2018-02-01

Author

Sarigil, Erdem
Altıngövde, İsmail Sengör
BLANCO, Roi
Barla Cambazoglu, B.
ÖZCAN, Rifat
Ulusoy, Ozgur

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A non-negligible fraction of user queries end up with very few or even no matching results in leading commercial web search engines. In this work, we provide a detailed characterization of such queries and show that search engines try to improve such queries by showing the results of related queries. Through a user study, we show that these query suggestions are usually perceived as relevant. Also, through a query log analysis, we show that the users are dissatisfied after submitting a query that match no results at least 88.5% of the time. As a first step towards solving these no-answer queries, we devised a large number of features that can be used to identify such queries and built machine-learning models. These models can be useful for scenarios such as the mobile- or meta-search, where identifying a query that will retrieve no results at the client device (i.e., even before submitting it to the search engine) may yield gains in terms of the bandwidth usage, power consumption, and/or monetary costs. Experiments over query logs indicate that, despite the heavy skew in class sizes, our models achieve good prediction quality, with accuracy (in terms of area under the curve) up to 0.95.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/40099

Journal

JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.23955

Collections

Department of Computer Engineering, Article

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Characterizing web search queries that match very few or no results Altıngövde, İsmail Sengör; Cambazoglu, Berkant Barla; Ozcan, Rifat; Sarigil, Erdem; Ulusoy, Özgür (2012-12-19) Despite the continuous efforts to improve the web search quality, a non-negligible fraction of user queries end up with very few or even no matching results in leading web search engines. In this work, we provide a detailed characterization of such queries based on an analysis of a real-life query log. Our experimental setup allows us to characterize the queries with few/no results and compare the mechanisms employed by the major search engines in handling them.
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Citation Formats

E. Sarigil, İ. S. Altıngövde, R. BLANCO, B. Barla Cambazoglu, R. ÖZCAN, and O. Ulusoy, “Characterizing, Predicting, and Handling Web Search Queries That Match Very Few or No Results,” JOURNAL OF THE ASSOCIATION FOR INFORMATION SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, pp. 256–270, 2018, Accessed: 00, 2020. [Online]. Available: https://hdl.handle.net/11511/40099.