%0 Conference Paper
%A Chakrabarti, Deepayan
%A Kumar, Ravi
%A Punera, Kunal
%B 18th International World Wide Web Conference
%C Madrid, Spain
%D 2009
%F www2009:40
%P 391-391
%T Quicklink Selection for Navigational Query Results
%U http://www2009.eprints.org/40/
%X 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.