More Effective Web Search Using Bigrams and Trigrams

Abstract

This paper investigates the effectiveness of quoted bigrams and trigrams as query terms to target web search. Prior research in this area has largely focused on static corpora each containing only a few million documents, and has reported mixed (usually negative) results. We investigate the bigram/trigram extraction problem and present an extraction algorithm that shows promising results when applied to real-time web search. We also present a prototype augmented search software package that can leverage the results provided by a web search engine to assist the web searcher identify important phrases and related documents quickly. This software has received favourable feedback in a recent user survey.