Exploring Semantic Characteristics of Socially Constructed Knowledge Repository to Optimize Web Search

Introduction

The introduction and subsequent explosion of the Web has dramatically changed our approach to access and use of information. Internet is becoming a part of life for most people in the world. However, as indicated by Baeza-Yates and Ribeiro-Neto (1999), most users have difficulties in expressing their information needs in search-term format: they prefer short queries instead of the Boolean expressions (Jansen & Spink, 2006). To address this issue, most search engines encourage users to enter very short search terms as queries, and then return a list of search results which are ranked by technologies such as traditional information retrieval models and PageRank (Page, et al., 1998), according to the relevance degree of the results with respect to a given query. However, as the volume of information on the Web is becoming unbelievably huge, short search terms based Web search usually leads to search engines return a list of thousands, even millions of search results. Searchers are thus frustrated when facing such a long list of results especially when half of the search results are irrelevant to their information needs (Gauch, Chaffee, & Pretschner, 2003). It is now commonly recognized that information search services are far from perfect. The challenges of search engines are summarized in Table 1.