Efficient Search for Web Browsing Recipes

Information search in the Web can become cumbersome if the desired information is scattered across multiple websites. For instance, even though there exist pages listing track chairs of the past ICWS conferences and web accessible bibliography databases, compiling the list of recent journal publications of the ICWS track chairs with the help of existing search engines is still a time consuming task. It is even harder to find information from the Deep Web as it requires user interactions that are hard to simulate by automatic crawlers. Semantic search based on structured data aims at efficiently answering information needs but relies on the cooperation of providers to be able to access their data. We aim at providing an alternative solution by introducing web browsing recipes that are goal-oriented end user browsing processes containing instructions for accessing, extracting, and merging (dynamic) information from various websites. Browsing recipes can be shared and reused to allow users to benefit from the browsing efforts of others. In order to achieve this goal, the development of efficient search techniques is the main prerequisite for effectively sharing and reusing recipes. In this paper we propose an efficient search technique for finding browsing recipes from large recipe repositories. Our search technique necessitates a structured query specifying the required information along with constraints on the structure of the browsing processes. We augment explicit state representation based model checking technique by indexing structures tailored to the requirements of information search based on the recipes. The performance evaluation of our approach reveals the impact of the indexing structures on the overall recipe search efficiency.