Centroid-Based Search Support

Abstract

In the previous two chapters, it was shown that centroid terms are helpful in text analysis tasks and can be used to contruct hierarchical document structures. Based on these considerations and findings, in this chapter, it shall be shown that centroid terms are actually helpful in supporting and improving interactive search processes in decentralised web search systems, too. These considerations are divided in three parts: first, a general evaluation of the centroid-terms’ applicability in these processes is given, second, an approach to evaluate the quality of search queries using them is introduced and third, a novel method to rank documents in the generated tree-like library structure based on user access rates is presented.