Anticipatory search: using context to initiate search

  • Authors:
  • Daniel J. Liebling;Paul N. Bennett;Ryen W. White

  • Affiliations:
  • Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA;Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

  • Venue:
  • SIGIR '12 Proceedings of the 35th international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Identifying content for which a user may search has a variety of applications, including ranking and recommendation. In this poster, we examine how pre-search context can be used to predict content that the user will seek before they have even specified a search query. We call this anticipatory search. Using a log-based approach, we compare different methods for predicting the content to be searched using different attributes of the pre-query context and behavioral signals from previous visitors to the most recent browse URL. Each method covers different cases and shows promise for query-free anticipatory search on the Web.