A Prototype Process-Based Search Engine

This paper introduces a novel approach to solving a certain type of Web search problem. The concept of process-based Web search is proposed and a prototype process-based search engine has been developed and evaluated to help users solve problems more effectively. Unlike traditional Web search engines showing a list of ranked hyperlinks as results, the proposed system searches and displays results based on the process. Therefore, users do not have to read, understand, and then search further to find all the information that they are looking for. In addition, different from business process systems, the proposed Web search engine is designed to be available to the general public to solve everyday problems. It is based on the processes not having to be strictly defined to meet pre-requisite of applications such as business process execution engines. Experimental results have shown that the process-based search engine improves search quality for some types of complex queries, compared to a traditional Web search engine.