Conveying Taxonomy Context for Topic-Focused Web Search

Introducing context to a user query is effective to improve the search effectiveness. In this article we propose a method employing the taxonomy-based search services such as Web directories to facilitate searches in any Web search interfaces that support Boolean queries. The proposed method enables one to convey current search context on taxonomy of a taxonomy-based search service to the searches conducted with the Web search interfaces. The basic idea is to learn the search context in the form of a Boolean condition that is commonly accepted by many Web search interfaces, and to use the condition to modify the user query before forwarding it to the Web search interfaces. To guarantee that the modified query can always be processed by the Web search interfaces and to make the method adaptive to different user requirements on search result effectiveness, we have developed new fast classification learning algorithms.