Query selection for improved Greek web searches

  • Authors:

  • Sofia Stamou;Lefteris Kozanidis;Paraskevi Tzekou;Nikos Zotos

  • Affiliations:

  • Patras University, Patras, Greece;Patras University, Patras, Greece;Patras University, Patras, Greece;Patras University, Patras, Greece

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the 2nd ACM workshop on Improving non english web searching
  • Year:
  • 2008

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Abstract

As the Web becomes an integral part of our everyday life and the Internet-literate population grows rapidly, the Search Engine market is steadily gaining a high monetary value. Unfortunately, today, the distribution of the search market share is dominated by English-speaking users and stakeholders, basically because English is the lingua franca of the Web. Thus, although the majority of the Web users are non-English native speakers, they naturally gravitate to using English in order to explore the plentiful Web content. In this paper, we propose a query selection mechanism for assisting users perform successful non-English Web searches. Our mechanism combines linguistic analysis and Web mining techniques and aims at assisting users select informative and well-specified queries for expressing their information needs in languages other than English. Our technique is validated on a dataset of 70 Greek queries issued to Google search engine over a period of 3 weeks. Obtained results demonstrate that our query selection mechanism yields improved retrieval performance compared to existing non-English search strategies and as such we believe that it can be fruitfully deployed for other natural languages.