Evolving Web Search Expressions

As the volume and variety of information sources, especially on the World Wide Web (WWW), continues to grow, the requirements imposed on search applications are steadily increasing. The amount of available data is growing and so do user demands. Search application should provide the users with accurate, sensible responses to their requests. It is difficult to provide information that accurately matches user information needs. Search effectiveness can be seen as the accuracy of matching user information needs against the retrieved information. There are problems emerging: users often do not present search queries in the form that optimally represents their information need, the measure of a document´s relevance is often highly subjective between different users and information sources might contain heterogeneous documents, in multiple formats and the representation of documents is not unified. This contribution presents a proposal to improve web search effectiveness via evolutionary optimization of Boolean and vector search queries based on individual user models.