Structural Web search and query mining

This paper presents a new approach in web search engines. The web creates new challenges for information retrieval. The vast improvement in information access is not the only advantage resulting from the keyword search. Additionally, much potential exists for analyzing interests and relationships within the structure of the web. The creation of a hyperlink by the author of a web page explicitly represents a relationship between the source and destination pages which demonstrates the hyperlink structure between web pages. Our web search engine searches not only for the keywords in the web pages, but also for the hyperlink structure between them. The query can be restricted by specifying the labels which appear on the links. Experiments comparing the results of structural web searches versus keyword-only searches indicate an improved ability to access desired information. Query mining is another issue addressed in this research. Certain features of the queries like a combination of keywords and query structure might be interesting for knowledge discovery on a corpus of structural data like the queries posted by users. We used SUBDUE[5], the structural knowledge discovery system to mine the queries stored by our search engine. The experimental results reveal some interesting structural patterns common between the queries.