Context Matcher: Improved Web Search Using Query Term Context in Source Document and in Search Results

Abstract

When reading a Web page or editing a word processing document, we often search the Web by using a term on the page or in the document as part of a query. There is thus a correlation between the purpose for the search and the document being read or edited. Modifying the query to reflect this purpose can thus improve the relevance of the search results. There have been several attempts to extract keywords from the text surrounding the search term and add them to the initial query. However, identifying appropriate additional keywords is difficult; moreover, existing methods rely on precomputed domain knowledge. We have developed Context Matcher: a query modification method that uses the text surrounding the search term in the initial search results as well as the text surrounding the term in the document being read or edited, the “source document”. It uses the text surrounding the search term in the initial results to weight candidate keywords in the source document for use in query modification. Experiments showed that our method often found documents more related to the source document than baseline methods that use context either in only the source document or search results.