Identifying Popular Search Goals behind Search Queries to Improve Web Search Ranking

Abstract

Web users usually have a certain search goal before they submit a search query. However, many laypersons can’t transform their search goals into suitable queries. Thus, understanding original search goals behind a query is very important for search engines. In the past decade, many researches focus on classifying search goals behind a query into different search-goal categories. In fact, there may be more than one search goal behind a certain query. We thus propose a novel Popular-Search-Goal-based Search Model to effectively identify search goals by the features extracted from search-result snippets and click-through data. Furthermore, we proposed a Search-Goal-based Ranking Model which exploits the identified search goals to re-rank the search result. The experimental result shows our proposed model can effectively identify the search goals behind a search query (achieve precision of 0.94) and enhance the search result ranking (achieve precision of 0.72 for top-1 returned snippet).