A supervised learning algorithm for binary domain classification of Web queries using SERPs

General purpose Search Engines (SEs) crawl all domains (e.g., Sports, News, Entertainment) of the Web, but sometimes the informational need of a query is restricted to a particular domain (e.g., Medical). We leverage the work of SEs as part of our effort to route domain specific queries to local Digital Libraries (DLs). SEs are often used even if they are not the “best” source for certain types of queries. Rather than tell users to “use this DL for this kind of query”, we intend to automatically detect when a query could be better served by a local DL (such as a private, access-controlled DL that is not crawlable via SEs). This is not an easy task because Web queries are short, ambiguous, and there is lack of quality labeled training data (or it is expensive to create). To detect queries that should be routed to local, specialized DLs, we first send the queries to Google and then examine the features in the resulting Search Engine Result Pages. Using 400,000 AOL queries for the “non-scholar” domain and 400,000 queries from the NASA Technical Report Server for the “scholar” domain, our classifier achieved a precision of 0.809 and F-measure of 0.805.