Destination Search for Informational Queries
IR queries generally fall into two categories: navigational queries which seek specific website or home page, and informational queries which seek general information (Manning’s IR book, Chapter 19). This Destination Search is proposed by researchers from Microsoft Research for the latter.
Their observation is that for an Informational Query, users typically browse a trail of web pages before finding a final web page that the user is interested in and stop browsing. This final web page is called “destination”. The “length” of this browsing trail is 4.8 web pages on average. The aim of the research is to shorten the length of browsing trail and bring up this “destination” web page immediately.
Different from traditional IR that match query against documents, Destination Search matches a new query against previous queries. A Destination Search engine maintains a dictionary of “query-destination” pairs, based on search logs collected from online users. When a new query comes, it is matched against previous queries in “query-destination” dictionary, and destinations of similar previous queries are returned as query result. User study also shows greater satisfaction of information seekers for this new IR system.
The idea comes from an ACM SIGIR ’07 paper titled “Studying the Use of Popular Destinations to Enhance Web Search Interaction”, http://research.microsoft.com/~mbilenko/papers/07-sigir.pdf