Time-aware structured query suggestion

Abstract

Most commercial search engines have a query suggestion feature, which is designed to capture various possible search intents behind the user's original query. However, even though different search intents behind a given query may have been popular at different time periods in the past, existing query suggestion methods neither utilize nor present such information. In this study, we propose Time-aware Structured Query Suggestion (TaSQS) which clusters query suggestions along a timeline so that the user can narrow down his search from a temporal point of view. Moreover, when a suggested query is clicked, TaSQS presents web pages from query-URL bipartite graphs after ranking them according to the click counts within a particular time period. Our experiments using data from a commercial search engine log show that the time-aware clustering and the time-aware document ranking features of TaSQS are both effective.