WWW2009 EPrints

Quicklink Selection for Navigational Query Results

This item is a Paper in the Search track.

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Abstract

Quicklinks for a website are navigational shortcuts displayed below the website homepage on a search results page, and that let the users directly jump to selected points inside the website. Since the real-estate on a search results page is constrained and valuable, picking the best set of quicklinks to maximize the benefits for a majority of the users becomes an important problem for search engines. Using user browsing trails obtained from browser toolbars, and a simple probabilistic model, we formulate the quicklink selection problem as a combinatorial optimizaton problem. We first demonstrate the hardness of the objective, and then propose an algorithm that is provably within a factor of (1 − 1/e) of the optimal. We also propose a different algorithm that works on trees and that can find the optimal solution; unlike the previous algorithm, this algorithm can incorporate natural constraints on the set of chosen quicklinks. The efficacy of our methods is demonstrated via empirical results on both a manually labeled set of websites and a set for which quicklink click-through rates for several webpages were obtained from a real-world search engine.

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This website has been set up for WWW2009 by Christopher Gutteridge of the University of Southampton, using our EPrints software.

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We (Southampton EPrints Project) intend to preserve the files and HTML pages of this site for many years, however we will turn it into flat files for long term preservation. This means that at some point in the months after the conference the search, metadata-export, JSON interface, OAI etc. will be disabled as we "fossilize" the site. Please plan accordingly. Feel free to ask nicely for us to keep the dynamic site online longer if there's a rally good (or cool) use for it... [this has now happened, this site is now static]