Collaborative web search

Abstract

Web search engines struggle to satisfy the needs of Web users. Users are notoriously poor at representing their needs in the form of a query, and search engines are poor at responding to vague queries. However progress has been made by introducing context into the search process. In this paper we describe and evaluate a novel approach to using context in Web search that adapts a generic search engine for the needs of a specialist community of users. This collaborative search method enjoys significant performance benefits and avoids the privacy and security concerns that are commonly associated with related personalization research.