Collaborative Re-Ranking of Search Results

In this paper we present a system architecture for coupling user and community profiling to the information search process. The search process and the ranking of relevant documents are accomplished within the context of a particular user or community point of view. The user and community profiles are built by analyzing document collections put together by the users and by the communities to which the users belong. Such profiles are used for ranking the documents retrieved during the search process. In addition, if the search results are (implicitly or explicitly) considered as relevant to the user or community, the user/community profiles can be tuned by re-weighting the profile terms. Both recommender systems and meta-search engines can be enhanced using this kind of collaborative environment for ranking the search results and re-weighting the user and community profiles.