An Analysis of Query Similarity in Collaborative Web Search

Web search logs provide an invaluable source of information regarding the search behaviour of users. This information can be reused to aid future searches, especially when these logs contain the searching histories of specific communities of users. To date this information is rarely exploited as most Web search techniques continue to rely on the more traditional term-based IR approaches. In contrast, the I-SPY system attempts to reuse past search behaviours as a means to re-rank result-lists according to the implied preferences of like-minded communities of users. It relies on the ability to recognise previous search sessions that are related to the current target search by looking for similarities between past and current queries. We have previously shown how a simple model of query similarity can significantly improve search performance by implementing this reuse approach. In this paper we build on previous work by evaluating alternative query similarity models.