A mechanism for improving the effectiveness of an internet search engine

摘要

Large websites employ internal search engines to assist visitors of the site to access pages relevant to the visitor's needs. Such internal search engines generally use a specialist database containing information relevant to the website. Internet search engines generally do not have access to the specialise databases and so the results they produce are frequently less useful than the results produced from the same query addressed to an internal search engine. The effectiveness of the internet search engine is improved by the use of a store (11) of information for each page (1) of the website, the store (11) comprising a record of each query (Q1, Q2 . . . Qn) directed to the page, the frequency (f1, f2 . . . fn) of the query and the relevance (r1, r2 . . . rn) of the query as calculated by a relevance calculator (5). Also included is a mechanism to generate, for each relevant query, an intent page (16) which contains the relevant query and a link to the webpage that it accessed. The intent pages (16) are made visible to the internet search engine thereby improving the efficiency by which users are directed to a relevant page.