Tossing coins to trim long queries

Verbose web queries are often descriptive in nature where a term based search engine is unable to distinguish between the essential and noisy words, which can result in a drift from the user intent. We present a randomized query reduction technique that builds on an earlier learning to rank based approach. The proposed technique randomly picks only a small set of samples, instead of the exponentially many sub-queries, thus being fast enough to be useful for web search engines, while still covering wide sub-query space.