Track: Search
Paper Title:
Navigating the Intranet with High Precision
Authors:
Abstract:
Despite the success of web search engines, search over large enterprise
intranets still suffers from poor result quality. Earlier
work that compared intranets and the Internet from the view
point of keyword search has pointed to several reasons why the search problem
is quite different in these two domains. In this paper, we address the problem
of providing high quality answers to navigational queries in the intranet
(e.g., queries intended to find product or personal home pages, service pages,
etc.). Our approach is based on offline identification of navigational pages,
intelligent generation of term-variants to associate with each page, and the
construction of separate indices exclusively devoted to answering navigational
queries. Using a testbed of 5.5M pages from the IBM intranet, we present
evaluation results that demonstrate that for navigational queries, our
approach of using custom indices produces results of significantly higher
precision than those produced by a general purpose search algorithm.
