Collaborative searching by query induction

A method and system to facilitate searching a data collection, such as the World Wide Web, that takes advantage of the collective ability of all users to create queries to the data collection. First, a node-link graph of all queries submitted to a data collection within a given period of time is constructed. In the case of the World Wide Web, the queries would be to a particular search engine. In the graph, each node is a query. There is a link made between two nodes whenever the two queries are judged to be related. A first key idea is that the determination of relatedness depends on the documents returned by the queries, not on the actual terms in the queries themselves. For example, a criterion for relatedness could be that of the top ten documents returned for each query, the two lists have at least one document in common. The invention also describes a way to allow the user to peruse the network of related queries in an ordered way: following a path from a first cousin, to a second cousin to a third cousin, etc. to a set of results. By doing this, the user is exposed to related documents that were not returned as a result of their query. A second key idea is that the construction of the query graph transforms single user usage of the data collection (e.g. search) into collaborative usage: all users can tap into the knowledge base of queries submitted by others. This is because each of the related queries represents the knowledge of the user who submitted the query.