Effective collection metasearch in a hierarchical environment: global vs. localized retrieval performance

Authors:
Jack G. Conrad;Changwen Yang;Joanne S. Claussen
Affiliations:
Thomson Legal & Regulatory, St. Paul, MN;Oracle Corporation, Redwd Shores, CA;West Group, Eagan, MN
Venue:
SIGIR '02 Proceedings of the 25th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in information retrieval
Year:
2002

Citing 2
Cited 0

Usability, user preferences, effectiveness, and user behaviors when searching individual and integrated full-text databases: implications for digital libraries

Journal of the American Society for Information Science
Concept Hierarchy Based Text Database Categorization in a Metasearch Engine Environment

WISE '00 Proceedings of the First International Conference on Web Information Systems Engineering (WISE'00)-Volume 1 - Volume 1

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Abstract

We compare standard global IR searching with user-centric localized techniques to address the database selection problem. We conduct a series of experiments to compare the retrieval effectiveness of three separate search modes applied to a hierarchically structured data environment of textual database representations. The data environment is represented as a tree-like directory containing over 15,000 unique databases and over 100,000 total leaf nodes. Our search modes consist of varying degrees of browse and search, from a global search at the root node to a refined search at a sub-node using dynamically-calculated inverse document frequencies (idfs) to score candidate databases for probable relevance. Our findings indicate that a browse and search approach that relies upon localized searching from sub-nodes is capable of producing the most effective results.