CONQUER: a system for efficient context-aware query suggestions

ABSTRACT

Many of today's search engines provide autocompletion while the user is typing a query string. This type of dynamic query suggestion can help users to formulate queries that better represent their search intent during Web search interactions. In this paper, we demonstrate our query suggestion system called CONQUER, which allows to efficiently suggest queries for a given partial query and a number of available query context observations. The context-awareness allows for suggesting queries tailored to a given context, e.g., the user location or the time of day. CONQUER uses a suggestion model that is based on the combined probabilities of sequential query patterns and context observations. For this, the weight of a context in a query suggestion can be adjusted online, for example, based on the learned user behavior or user profiles. We demonstrate the functionality of CONQUER based on 6 million queries from an AOL query log using the time of day and the country domain of the clicked URLs in the search result as context observations.

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Index Terms

• Information systems

  • Information retrieval

    • Information retrieval query processing