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Web Search Query Rewriting

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  • First Online:
Encyclopedia of Database Systems

Synonyms

Query assistance; Query expansion; Query reformulation; Query suggestion

Definition

Query rewriting in Web search refers to the process of reformulating an original input query to a new query in order to achieve better search results. Reformulation includes but not limited to the following:

  1. 1.

    Adding additional terms to express the search intent more accurately

  2. 2.

    Deleting redundant terms or re-weighting the terms in the original query to emphasize important terms

  3. 3.

    Finding alternative morphological forms of words by stemming each word, and searching for the alternative forms as well

  4. 4.

    Finding synonyms of words, and searching for the synonyms as well

  5. 5.

    Fixing spelling errors and automatically searching for the corrected form or suggesting it in the results

Historical Background

Web search queries are the words users type into web search engines to express their information need. These queries are typically 2–3 words long [7]. Traditional information retrieval allows...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Yahoo! Research, Burbank, CA, USA

    Rosie Jones

  2. Yahoo! Inc., Sunnyvale, CA, USA

    Fuchun Peng

Authors
  1. Rosie Jones
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  2. Fuchun Peng
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Rosie Jones .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Georgia Institute of Technology College of Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA

    Ling Liu

  2. University of Waterloo School of Computer Science, Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

    M. Tamer Özsu

Section Editor information

  1. Google Research, 76th 9th Ave, 10018, New York, NY, USA

    Cong Yu Research Scientist

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© 2016 Springer Science+Business Media New York

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Jones, R., Peng, F. (2016). Web Search Query Rewriting. In: Liu, L., Özsu, M. (eds) Encyclopedia of Database Systems. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_461-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4899-7993-3_461-2

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, New York, NY

  • Online ISBN: 978-1-4899-7993-3

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