Query Association Surrogates for Web Search

Collection sizes, query rates, and the number of users of Web search engines are increasing. Therefore, there is continued demand for innovation in providing search services that meet user information needs. In this article, we propose new techniques to add additional terms to documents with the goal of providing more accurate searches. Our techniques are based on query association, where queries are stored with documents that are highly similar statistically. We show that adding query associations to documents improves the accuracy of Web topic finding searches by up to 7%, and provides an excellent complement to existing supplement techniques for site finding. We conclude that using document surrogates derived from query association is a valuable new technique for accurate Web searching