Query ReFormulation on the internet: empirical data and the hyperindex search engine

Often queries to Internet search engines consist of one or two terms. As a consequence, the effectiveness of the retrieval suffers. This paper describes an internet search engine that helps the user formulate their query by a process of navigation through a structured, automatically constructed, information space called a hyperindex. In the first part of this paper, the logs of an internet search engine were analyzed to determine the proportions with which different types of query transformation occur. It was found that the primary transformation type was repetition of the previous query. Users also substitute, add and delete terms from a previous query and with lower frequency split compound terms, make changes to spelling, punctuation, and case and use derivative forms of words and abbreviations. The second part of the paper details the hyperindex - which aids the user in query term addition, deletion and substitution. The architecture of a hyperindex-based internet search engine is ...