The effect of a website directory when employed in browsing the results of a search engine

A method for improving the retrieval effectiveness of a search engine by employing a website directory, e.g., Yahoo! Japan directory or Google directory, as a concept dictionary is proposed. A user can examine the results of a search engine from the top rank as usual except that he/she is assisted by a suggestion about which webpages are worthy of examination. To make a suggestion the conceptual closeness of an unexamined webpage to a query or to each of the webpages that a user has been interested in is calculated via a website directory. The proposed method was evaluated on the search results of Japanese Excite.