Incremental Information Retrieval: Finding obscured information in Internet search

When searching the internet e.g. for a person, solution to a problem, or some topic of interest, the wanted outcome is usually specific answers. The result quality for this kind of search is reasonably precise, most of the time we get the answers we need. However, searching a second or third time with the same query, the outcome seems to be minor variations on the same results. So what if the search for information is of a different nature, more like exploring. A typical case would be when a person has a hobby, and time after time wants to search for information about it. Very soon all the quickly accessed information has already been seen, and is not that interesting in the context of new information. This paper presents an approach to Incremental Information Retrieval, where each repeated search with a given query, will provide the user with previously obscured (i.e. unseen) results. We have implemented a prototype system, called IIR, where we demonstrate and test our approach. The system targets situations where users have a continuous information need, that cannot be satisfied through a single search on the Internet, but where the user may want to see new results on the same subject over a period of days, months, or even years. A detailed description of the IIR system and results of our tests are presented.