Interactive Search Support for Difficult Web Queries

摘要

Short and common web queries are aptly supported by state-of-the-art search engines but performance and user experience are degraded when web queries are longer and less common. Extending previous solutions that automatically shorten queries, we introduce searchAs-sist: a novel search interface that provides interactive support for difficult web queries. The query logs and questionnaires from a naturalistic study of 90 web users' search behaviors show that the usage rate of search Assist for difficult queries was almost 40%. The results also highlight the importance of term dropping for long queries, and the improvements obtained in topical relevance when our searchers used searchAssist.